


City

by pontmercyfriend



Series: Danger Days [3]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Battery City, Brainwashing, Gen, Medication, Prophetic Dreams, Robots, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:41:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22764913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontmercyfriend/pseuds/pontmercyfriend
Summary: INFORMATION BOOKLET [M-MODS].Memory modification treatment [known colloquially as “m-mods”] is a simple process available to every citizen of Battery City. Whether you’re desiring to forget that nagging ex or erase lingering unpleasantness associated with an uncomfortable childhood, memory modification treatment is the right sort of therapy for the situation. […] Having your memories altered might not be an easy process to go through, whether it’s the first or the hundredth time it’s happened to you. Common side effects of memory modification treatment include slight dizziness, disorientation, tiredness, and loss of appetite. Most of these symptoms will fully vanish—much like the unwanted memories themselves—within two to three days. If confusion or blurred memories persist, make an appointment with your doctor for a follow-up treatment plan designed to combat potential miscommunication in the frontal lobe.
Relationships: Korse/Gerard Way
Series: Danger Days [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636693
Comments: 4
Kudos: 55





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacestationtrustfund](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/gifts).



Excerpt from _Battery City: A History_ , ch. 11, “Construction and deconstruction of antebellum droid technology, and its lingering effect on the dangerous subculture presently contained within the Lobby.”

_Hundreds of droids of great size and power were built with the intention of being used to defend in a wartime situation. Before the first nuclear-grade weapons were brought into the technological battlefield of the Helium Wars, the plan to guard the planet and its inhabitants had already been set into motion. […] The arisen issue demonstrated itself after the Pig Bomb was detonated in late September of 2017 on what had once been known as the eastern coast of America. Most of the constructed droids were too large in scale to be utilized for any menial task, and once the Helium Wars had ended, there remained no use for such technology that could not be completed by other similar machines that had been specifically designed for such tasks. […] The mythos surrounding the cultish worship of an alleged “DESTROYA” who is destined to overturn the balance of good and evil by destroying Battery City was first overheard on the streets of the Lobby and passed on by word of mouth, primarily amongst the culture constructed within communities of pornodroids and their managers (often cybernetically enhanced veterans of the Helium Wars or citizens who had worked in antebellum factories building the now-superannuated technology). The actual, physical manifestation of the alleged “DESTROYA” (theorized to be a puerile play on the term “destroyer,” a cognomen of early bug bombs) most likely stemmed from the deactivated droids used during the Helium Wars, most of which were discarded in the desert and subsequently imbued with toxic levels of radioactivity._

INFORMATION BOOKLET [M-MODS].

_Memory modification treatment [known colloquially as “m-mods”] is a simple process available to every citizen of Battery City. Whether you’re desiring to forget that nagging ex or erase lingering unpleasantness associated with an uncomfortable childhood, memory modification treatment is the right sort of therapy for the situation. […] Having your memories altered might not be an easy process to go through, whether it’s the first or the hundredth time it’s happened to you. Common side effects of memory modification treatment include slight dizziness, disorientation, tiredness, and loss of appetite. Most of these symptoms will fully vanish—much like the unwanted memories themselves—within two to three days. If confusion or blurred memories persist, make an appointment with your doctor for a follow-up treatment plan designed to combat potential miscommunication in the frontal lobe._

Snippet of Battery City Times. Personal columnist. [Name(s) redacted.]

_[…] None of us really thought to question the sudden change that led to the disappearance of [XXXX]. Things like that just happened, in the city. People appeared, people disappeared; it was hardly an uncommon occurrence. […] I was twelve at the time. When I tried to picture [XXXX]’s face, or even if [XXXX] had ever existed, it was just a blur. And then it was a blank. As promised, within a week or so, there wasn’t even an empty space in my memories where [XXXX] should have been._

INFORMATION BOOKLET [ZONES].

_Battery City proudly and frequently boasts its low crime rate. The theory is that when all citizens are healthy and subsequently happy, criminal activity will diminish naturally. (They don’t mention the sedatives.) Manufacturing a balanced environment replete with simplicity and therefore free from extensive levels of stress or heightened emotion will result in happier citizens, with less incentive to unreasonably harm others. This is another reason why Better Living Industries is working to rehabilitate the terrorist groups situated in the desert. They don’t want anyone to be hurt, they explain, and the chaos lingering malignantly in the primarily criminal-populated Zones is surely prime territory for illegal activity._

INFORMATION BOOKLET [RAMUs].

_Everything runs out of energy eventually. Not even Better Living Industries can make an infinite motion machine, although we have been trying our hardest to surpass the putative laws of input and output. […] Robotic Alternative Mothering Units [RAMUs] from the Parenting Device Dispatching Services [PDDS] eventually begin to decay—to wear down, to run out of energy. It follows that the RAMU in question will subsequently be summoned to BL-HQ to be replaced with a newer model. Just like an old battery. Even rechargeable batteries can only last for so long. […] If a RAMU is called back to the factory for remodeling or refurbishment, a replacement should be immediately provided for the family in question._

Excerpt from Battery City: A History, ch. 6, “The Analog Wars.” [Unofficial predated copy - REDACT INFORMATION. **REJECTED.** ]

_The way the city describes it is like this: A facsimile of the War on Terror that ended poorly for everyone involved. Desert rebels wanting to destroy everything good about the life the citizens currently get to enjoy. Terrorists trying to bring about anarchy, which is described as the worst possible outcome, the polar opposite to the ritualistic structure that comforts everyone within the walls of Battery City._

***

2025, Battery City.

Formal education for all citizens of Battery City commences at age three, which means that he’s already got three years of experience under his belt by the time Mikey starts accompanying him on the daily walk from the house (438, Building 12, Sector 7) to the Hub at the end of the street where they can get on the Battery City Transit System that will take them to the school building (Building 6, Sector 5).

“You’ve got the responsibility to take care of your brother now,” their mother informs him. She holds up one finger in warning.

He tries not to fidget because he knows he isn’t supposed to fidget, and last time the doctor (Building B7, Sector 5) made him take extra pills that tasted gross and stuck in his throat when he swallowed them.

He tries not to fidget too much.

Normally he doesn’t like extra responsibility, because it usually means things like extra chores, but he knows this is a special sort of situation because it’s about Mikey.

Mikey is too young to be super interesting, but he always likes listening when Gerard comes up with stories, so sometimes he isn’t all that bad. Gerard takes it upon himself to explain the concepts of zombies and vampires like he’s read in comic books he saw in the Battery City Library (Building 308, Sector 10), and Mikey listens obediently with wide eyes, until their mother overhears and scolds them for making up nonsense.

They aren’t supposed to read comic books because they’re too young, but he likes them anyway, because they don’t have as many big words and the pictures are always exciting to look at. The historical section of the library is restricted, but he’s been able to sneak in a few times when nobody’s paying attention. There are shelves of old Japanese manga and doujinshi and grayscale _shonen_ or _seijin_ paperbacks, as well as a few rare copies of translated American comics—superheroes like Batman, Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk. He can hardly wait for the day he’s old enough to do proper research on history.

Their mother makes two lunches every morning now, and she kisses them both on the forehead before she sends them off to catch the bus.

It isn’t a long walk to make (across the hall to the elevator, down nineteen floors, exit the building, turn left, walk four blocks to the transit Hub); he’s made it every day since he started school. It isn’t difficult to remember, either, and he knows he’s supposed to be focusing on remembering because sometimes he gets distracted and ends up lost. That’s why he focuses on locations, details, little things.

Mikey slips his hand into Gerard’s almost as soon as they step out of the apartment door on their way to the elevator. His fingers are small and cold; he’s always cold, even though the temp controls inside the apartment complex are adjusted to maximum comfort.

The elevator ride is spent mostly in silence. Small talk is superfluous, pointless; only important things should be said. Besides, he thinks, he’s always been good at figuring out what Mikey wants to say even before Mikey says it.

“You’ll be fine,” Gerard says, reassuring, and squeezes Mikey’s hand. He remembers that he was nervous on his first day of school too.

Mikey nods obediently, but he holds on tightly to his brother’s hand all the way down the hall, into the elevator, down the street, onto the bus that will take them to school, all the way until they’re at Mikey’s classroom (Floor 1, Room 97) and he doesn’t have any choice to let go so that Gerard can go find his own (Floor 4, Room 53).

Now that Mikey is old enough to be able to do things other than sleep and cry all the time, Gerard can hardly sit still during his classes (he thinks: History, Health, Mathematics, Society), thinking of all the interesting things he can show his brother. He can’t really pay attention to what he’s supposed to be learning, but it doesn’t matter that much anyway; he never remembers what he learned that day. He always does well on tests though, so it can’t be that important to remember.

“Gerard,” says the teacher firmly, tapping her fingers on the gray plastic of his desk, “try not to fidget. Channel excess energy into productivity.”

“Sorry,” he whispers, and ducks his head. It’s just difficult to stay still.

He can take Mikey to the park near their house (he thinks: Area 62, Sector 7), where he sometimes like to go because you can see the view of most of Battery City from the top of the concrete hill; he can show Mikey how to take his medications properly now that he’s old enough to swallow pills; he can tell Mikey all about the one time he saw an actual Exterminator walking down the street with a real raygun, the kind that shoots actual lasers instead of the boring fake plastic ones that kids are supposed to play with.

Having a little brother is going to be so awesome now that Mikey can actually _do_ things.

He doesn’t run down to the First Level classrooms at the end of the day to retrieve Mikey, but it’s a close call.

Mikey is sitting quietly in a chair with his hands tucked under his legs. He looks up when he sees Gerard. He doesn’t smile, not fully, but he gives Gerard the familiar Mikey-smile, the one that no one but Gerard knows is even a smile at all. “’Lo,” he says, kicking his feet.

Back and forth. Back and forth. His shoes thump against the plastic chair.

“Michael!” the First Level teacher says, her voice chastising. “You know we aren’t supposed to use slang, it’s degenerative.”

“Sorry,” Mikey mutters, but he doesn’t look that sorry.

 _C’mon, let’s go home_ , Gerard wants to say, but he doesn’t want the First Level teacher to yell at him for using slang too. Even though it wasn’t really yelling, because raising your voice in anger is counterproductive. He tries to gesture with his eyes instead, and Mikey somehow seems to understand. He gets up off the chair and reaches for his bag.

They stop by the park (he thinks: Area 62, Sector 7) on the way home, and Mikey gazes quietly at the tops of the buildings and the grayish-blue of the sky like it’s the coolest thing in the world. He looks at Gerard like he’s the coolest _person_ in the world, too, which feels pretty great.

Their mother isn’t home from work (he thinks: Battery Towers, Building A, Sector 12) when they make it to the apartment complex, but the front door only has the standard passcode that every residential building has—7-2-3-3—and they each have passcards that grant access to their apartment. It’s five small, compartmentalized rooms for maximum efficiency—their mother’s bedroom, their shared bedroom, the kitchen and dining area, and the living room with the television. The apartment is exactly the same as every other apartment in the building; it’s comforting, to close the door and be surrounded by those familiar white walls and plastic windows.

“Do you have any homework?” Gerard asks. Mikey shakes his head.

They sit together on the couch in front of the television and watch Mousekat on BLTV because it’s the only real program on the TV. Gerard rummages through the cabinets and finds some snacks—dried fruit and vegetables—because even though he’s hungrier than that, he knows it isn’t healthy to eat too much in between meals.

“I’ve seen this episode,” he says, chewing. “The lizard things are just monsters cause of the radiation.”

Mikey gives him a look that means he probably spoiled it, but Mikey’s going to keep watching despite that. Gerard shrugs and stays on the couch anyway. There are only two channels on BLTV, Mousekat for kids and Fact News for adults. He doesn’t have any homework either. There isn’t really anything else for him to do. He could take a nap, but it’s already close enough to dinner that it wouldn’t be healthy for him to sleep.

Their mother arrives home from work (he thinks: Battery Towers, Building A, Sector 12) around the time that Mousekat is able to concoct a magical pill that will reverse the effects of the radiation. “Hello, Gerard. Hello, Michael,” she says, ruffling Gerard’s hair and kissing the top of Mikey’s head as she walks by. “How was your first day of school, Michael?”

“Okay,” says Mikey. His eyes haven’t left the TV; on the screen, Mousekat is doing a victory dance while the assorted cast of characters cheers him on happily.

Dinner is rehydrated pasta and protein cubes like usual. Their mother sets the table with a bottle of filtered mineral-infused water in front of each place. Pre-war, clean water was scarce in California; now, it’s a necessity. Gerard sits in the uncomfortable wooden chair at the dining room table and tries not to fidget. The sound of his fork scraping across the metal plate grates in his ears. _Scrape. Scrape. Scrrrrrape_.

“Michael, remember not to play with your food,” says their mother. She presses her lips together, waiting.

“Sorry,” says Mikey. He pushes his noodles around on his plate. _Scrape. Scrrrrr_ —

Gerard doesn’t have much of an appetite anymore.

He looks down at the food on his plate, bland and tasteless. Eating isn’t supposed to be pleasurable; it’s a necessity, not a luxury. Luxuries are—

He frowns.

Luxuries are bad.

He says, “I’m not hungry, can I be excused?”

“ _Could_ I be excused,” his mother corrects, but her voice is gentle. “Of course. It’s late, and I expect you both would be tired after a long, productive day.”

He goes to their shared room. The curtains are still open, because it’s before curfew. He curls up in the window seat and presses his nose to the plastic, his breath creating fogged clouds of moisture. He can see the school building from here. Most of the buildings look similar—the same brutalist architecture with all its sharp corners and staggering skyscrapers—save for the signs. Latin and kanji. _Building 4J, Building 18W, Building 3L_.

He exhales purposefully onto to the plastic, then tries to draw the kanji characters of his own name. He gets as far as _ゲラ_ before he doesn’t remember how to form the other characters, and he gives up.

He’s alone in the room for a while, because Mikey goes to bed on time like a good kid, eyelids drooping. He’s got his headphones on, curled up in a little lump underneath the blankets, already almost asleep by the time their mother comes into their room to kiss them both goodnight and turn off the lights.

It isn’t really dark anyway, even when the lights are all switched off. Complete darkness puts unnecessary strain on your eyes, and you could even go blind if you’re out of the light for too long.

“Good night,” says their mother, brushing Gerard’s hair out of his eyes and kissing his forehead. “Sleep better!”

He thinks, better than what? but he doesn’t ask, just clicks on the headphones (he thinks: volume level 7.5) and closes his eyes like he’s sleeping. Now that he’s actually supposed to be asleep, he’s never felt more awake.

He manages to wait almost a full minute after she shuts the door quietly behind her before he slips out of bed and pads over to the window. There’s a ledge up against the sill; he presses his nose to the plastic (he thinks: ventilated, room temperature, Plexiglas).

He likes to look out the window at the rooftops of Battery City at night, when the sky is dark and yet the streets are illuminated by the light coming from the windows and from the constant eerie glow of the city itself. He knows that the city is lit up day and night because of the electricity running through it, like the city is one giant generator.

That’s where all the power comes from; that’s why the city is named after batteries. He doesn’t understand _how_ , but he understands _why_.

Tonight, there are a couple of stars in the sky. They look sharp and bright and fixed.

He wonders what stars would feel like to touch, to hold in his hands. Probably they would be heavy, cold, sharp-edged. He doesn’t really know what much about the stars, because he’s learned in school that focusing on things that he can’t reach is pointless. He’s never going to touch a star, so why would he waste time thinking about it? and besides, _curiosity killed the cat_ , or some saying like that.

He doesn’t really understand what that means, but he knows that questioning adults is a bad idea because they know better than he does, so he doesn’t worry about it too much.

One of the coolest things he’s learned in school (he thinks: Building 6, Sector 5, Floor 4, Room 53) is about how people used to go to space, just as easily as someone might run over to a friend’s house. His textbook has a black-and-white drawing of a miniature rocket in the corner of one page, and his eyes are drawn to it every time he opens the book.

He knows a little bit about the old government (he thinks: _obsolete, antiquated, superannuated_ ) and how there used to be a huge space program, but it was abandoned during the Helium Wars, so all the leftover machinery and discarded junk was just left floating around in the emptiness.

He thinks it’s the most awesome thing ever. It could only be more awesome if people could go up and rescue all the dead satellites and start using them again.

When Mikey wakes up the next morning, he thinks, he’s going to tell Mikey a story about going to space in a rocket that looks like the tiny one in his history textbook, gray and rough-edged. He’ll make Mikey into an important space explorer ( _astronaut_ , he thinks; the word feels thrilling and dangerous), and he’ll be a scientist who gets to come along for the ride. They’ll be able to look down at Battery City and wave at everyone they now as they soar high above everything.

He’s thinking about how cool it would be if the imaginary spaceship had weapons too (he thinks: _forbidden_ , _contraband_ , _illegal for civilian usage_ ) and could fight a giant lizard monster with teeth as big as he is tall that wanted to stomp the city flat in one step (it looks a lot like the villains in the Mousekat episode he and Mikey watched earlier), when one of the stars starts _moving_.

He jerks his chin off his hand so fast he bashes the back of his hand against the windowsill, but he’s still a heroic space explorer, so he ignores the tears pricking his eyes and threatening to spill over, even though it really hurts.

Forgetting that it’s long after curfew and he’s supposed to be fast asleep in his bed with his headphones on, he calls out excitedly, “Mom! Mom, c’min here!”

The tiny pinprick of light has leapt across the sky and is already gone, but it’s still exciting, because it happened and he saw it.

He _saw_ it.

He scrambles down from the window ledge and bangs his chin against the wall in the process and stumbles a little, momentarily dizzy, and that’s when his mother bursts into the room, eyes wide and worried.

She’s still wearing her old jeans and the striped shirt that’s so soft he likes to cuddle up against it whenever he can, and she looks scared.

He kind of thought she would be excited, but she just sounds upset when she hisses, “What are you doing up?” and grabs onto his arm tight enough that it hurts when he tries to squirm away. “Get back in—” _Bed_ , she’s going to say.

(Bed: _warm, safe, comfort, routine, better_.)

He thinks, space explorers wouldn’t have bedtimes.

It isn’t fair that _he_ does.

“You gotta see this!” he protests, and tries to pull away from her grip, to return to the window and the sky and the stars. “It’s a shooting star. And I made a wish!”

He’s wearing his most favorite pajama shirt, the gray one with the letters on the front (nylon, cotton, industrial). It’s a lucky shirt, which is probably why he saw the star in the first place, he thinks.

Most of the time, the stars above Battery City stay firmly in place, fixed, and stubbornly refuse to move.

Tonight is _special_.

His mother sighs, her face relaxing somewhat. She sets a gentle hand on his cheek and glances out the window like it might grow teeth and attack.

“Please, baby,” she says, in the tone of voice that means she’s pleading but trying to make it sound like it’s something optional, “you have to go back to bed, there are _rules_ in this house.” When he doesn’t move, she adds, “In this _city_.”

But rules are boring, and bed is boring. He disregards her with the cheerful oblivion of a six-year-old in favor of climbing back up onto the ledge so he can press his nose to the Plexiglas of the window again.

“Wanna know what I wished for? Wanna know?” His breath makes another cloud on the plastic. He can still see the faint outlines of his abandoned kanji attempt, and he thinks about trying to draw a rocket ship in the fog. It wouldn’t be as cool as the imaginary one, though, so he doesn’t. “I wished for scarecrows and draculas to be not real.”

She glances through the curtains, distracted by something on the street below.

Her hand is still holding onto his upper arm.

“Wait,” she says distantly, attention drawn away, then snaps back. “Wait. Why—why would you wish for that?”

He lets her shepherd him back to bed, reluctantly. The headphones (he thinks: volume level 7.5) are hanging where they always are, plugged into the charging port on the wall, cord trailing.

His are pastel blue, one of the few approved shades of color. Mikey’s are a dullish red, which makes them cooler because red is much cooler than blue, but Mikey is only a baby so he gets all the cooler stuff, and besides, _he’s_ still asleep because he’s a _baby_ , curled up in a ball under the comforter.

He remembers then that he’s supposed to be explaining the wish.

“Some kids at school—they—they said that they’re, that they’re bad people—that they do bad things.”

His and Mikey’s father worked with the SCARECROW division ( _Exterminators_ , he thinks, protective forces), he knows that much, even if he doesn’t know what happened to his father—his mother doesn’t like to talk about it, and he doesn’t like to see her upset, so he doesn’t mention it anymore. He thinks that possibly their father was sent out on a top-secret mission to terrorist-occupied territory and sacrificed himself bravely to perish in the line of fire so that his companions could escape and complete their assigned missions. It’s almost like their father was one of the action heroes in the comic books he isn’t really supposed to know about.

What his classmates said must be wrong by default. Their father wasn’t a bad person, or his mother wouldn’t have married him, and had him and Mikey. It still helps when his mother confirms it, though.

“Well, the kids at school are wrong,” she says on cue, and smooths the hair off his forehead as he puts on the headphones (volume level 7.5, he thinks) and kicks the covers carefully back into place. He doesn’t need extra blankets, but he likes the comforting pressure of being wrapped in all the layers. “SCARECROW and the _draculoids_ protect us. They work for Better Living Industries to keep Battery City safe and keep bad things out.”

He nods grudgingly; he knows the information by heart because it’s the same information he’s learned in school. The _bad things_ probably aren’t as exciting as the lizard monsters Mousekat was fighting on the TV earlier that evening, or the mythical zombies and vampires from the comic books he isn’t meant to be reading, but then again—maybe they’re even cooler. He doesn’t know.

If draculoids or SCARECROWs didn’t exist, he could maybe go see for himself. At the moment, suddenly, that’s all he can think about.

“They don’t allow for any mistakes,” his mother is saying, her tone of voice shifting into firm, “which is why—I mean, eight hours of sleep is mandatory for—”

He can anticipate the lecture coming—eight hours of sleep is the mandatory minimum for children because of health reasons—and pulls his covers up over his nose.

“Okay, okay, I’m going to sleep,” he whispers, and closes his eyes tightly to prove that he means it. Then he has another sudden thought, and his eyes fly back open. “But wait, mom, tomorrow,” he says, “can you tell me what’s outside the city?”

Normally she likes telling stories to him and Mikey before bed or during breakfast, but right now she just looks exhausted. “I’ve told you before—”

“Yeah, but I wanna hear it all again! Me and Mikey were watching the Mousekat episode again, you know the one where Mousekat fights the big lizard monster in the desert, since no one can live out there cause of the sand and radiation and all, until—”

“Okay,” she says, pressing her fingertips to her temples, “okay. If you go to sleep right now, and don’t get up until it’s morning—eight hours, and I mean it!—then I’ll tell you and your brother a story tomorrow morning before you go to school.”

He doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep with the excitement, thinking about the thrill of shooting stars and the potential of lizard monsters and the anticipation of stories, but it only takes a few minutes of listening to the faint sound of Mikey’s soft snuffling breathing mingling with the quiet static in his headphones (he thinks: volume level 7.5) before his eyes close.

He wakes up before the alarm goes off, eyes flying open, and scrambles out of his bed.

He had been dreaming about a gigantic metal droid, dull silver metal like pre-war machines, lurching creakily across a hill that was probably the same one where he and Mikey went to play. Mikey is still asleep, so he runs across the room and jumps on Mikey’s bed, and Mikey wakes up with a squeaking noise and kicks him in the shoulder on accident while they’re both wrestling with the tangles of sheets and blankets.

Breakfast is re-hy oatmeal and powdered juice from the freezer, and their mother doesn’t tell any stories, just hurriedly gets the two of them dressed in warm clothes and sends them off to the Hub to get on the bus before it leaves without them.

She doesn’t kiss their foreheads to say goodbye like she normally does, which is kind of weird, but he forgets about it within the first five minutes after he gets to the school building because one of the other boys in his class has a new plastic action hero figurine and he won’t let anyone touch it even though he keeps taking it out of his pocket every two seconds to show off to everyone.

School is a concrete fixture: Building 6, Sector 5. The apartment is a concrete fixture: 438, Building 12, Sector 7. It’s easier to remember where things are, to focus on doing only what he’s supposed to instead of getting distracted and fidgeting all over the place, when he concentrates on the solid gridwork of Battery City. Everything has a place. He imagines it like the cubicles he knows are in Battery Towers, where eventually he’ll probably work. In twelve years, he thinks. The only bad part about turning eighteen will be that he won’t be able to walk Mikey to school anymore.

After school he has to gather Mikey so that they can go back to the apartment together, because Mikey’s passcard still needs to be activated by a chaperone. Mikey’s class drew maps of their respective Sectors that day; he shows Gerard his drawing during the brief walk to the Hub. It’s black crayon on white paper, with a little picture of what must be their apartment, the three of them inside.

“My hair doesn’t look like that,” Gerard says, and Mikey looks worried, scrunching up his face the way he does when he’s trying not to cry. “It’s an awesome picture, though,” he adds quickly, before the tears start to flow. “You even drew mom making breakfast, that’s super cool!”

“Yeah,” Mikey says doubtfully, still squirming a little. Gerard helps him fold the paper carefully so he can put it in Mikey’s backpack to keep it safe.

During the bus ride back to the apartment complex, Mikey tries to tell him more about what he learned in his classes that day, but the story doesn’t make much sense, so he tells Mikey his own story that he came up with. It takes place in a made-up world in which the two of them run away to go live in the poisoned radioactive desert and help Mousekat to fight giant lizard monsters that want to destroy Battery City and everyone living in it. There are spaceships and robots and also giant cats because Mikey wanted giant cats and Gerard wouldn’t refuse him anything, and the whole thing is very elaborate. Gerard loses track of the plot somewhere around the time that he and Mikey are inventing an entirely new sort of machine that lets them teleport from one place to another so that they can stop the mutant frog monster that’s eating all the flies in Battery City, which is bad because the flies are actually Spy Flies that record information for the city, and without the information he and Mikey can’t figure out the plans of the evil lizards that are still trying to take over the world. He thinks there was something about scorpions, too, because he knows scorpions live in the desert. They have poison in their tails, which is awesome. Mikey also wants to ride a cat because he learned about cats in class, and even though cats aren’t big enough to ride, the made-up world has giant cats that you can climb on, as long as you’re small enough, like Mikey is. Mikey seems satisfied by this, and he holds onto Gerard’s hand all the way back to the apartment (he thinks: 438, Building 12, Sector 7) again, thinking about rocket ships and enormous cats and evil mutant frog monsters.

“Scorpions,” Mikey says, thoughtful. He has to let go of Gerard’s hand so Gerard can stand up on his toes and type in the passcode to get in the apartment.

There’s a piece of paper on the kitchen counter that has big, bold kanji lettering all over it. Gerard climbs up on one of the kitchen chairs while Mikey looks for a snack and tries to read the words. He can make out that it says _Parenting Device Dispatching Services (PDDS)_.

“PDDS,” he says, sounding out the words to Mikey, who listens without understanding, fidgeting with the collar of his fancier school shirt.

He tries to read the rest of the paper, but it’s also all in Japanese, and full of big words like _technicians_ and _parental appendment_ and _correlation of replacement facilities_ , and he doesn’t know what half of them mean even in English, so he gives up quickly, uninterested in whatever it is. He isn’t that worried about the paper; the thing that concerns him the most is that his mother promised to tell him a story in the morning and then didn’t.

She must have forgot.

He’s willing to forgive her for bundling them off to school (he thinks: Building 6, Sector 5) without the daily forehead kiss they’ve both come to expect. He’s even willing to forgive her for not making his lunch the right way—it’s arranged all wrong, and the rehydrated vegetables are touching the protein cubes, which ruins the whole thing because then it tastes gross.

But probably she’s just busy with boring grown-up stuff like whatever the paper means, and it’ll blow over soon enough. It always does.

He forgets about any weirdness throughout the day when Mikey wants him to make up another story about fighting monsters in the desert again, and Gerard gets distracted figuring out how sand would affect zombies. He hasn’t been able to go back to the library since his mother overheard him talking about the comic books, but he still likes thinking about zombies, especially since he knows that Better Living Industries has special reanimation programs that can bring people back to life as long as the proper doctors are called in soon enough. One of the girls in his class told him once that her uncle was reanimated, when he was hurt super badly during his work as an electrical specialist.

Mikey doesn’t really talk that much on his own, but he seems to like the stories Gerard makes up for him, especially the ones where the two of them are heroes who save the world from something evil and dangerous with glowing eyes and too many legs.

And maybe their mother doesn’t kiss them on the forehead every morning before they go to school anymore, but soon enough they forget that it was even a tradition in the first place anyway.

***

Growing up is weird. He knows that life in Battery City is near-identical from household to household, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. He goes to school with other kids his age, and there they learn the history of Better Living Industries, the story of Battery City, how much _better_ the world is now and how much worse it was before. They learn about the Helium Wars and how the world was almost destroyed, and they learn about the Analog Wars and how terrorists tried to destroy the newly rebuilt civilization. They learn that obeying the rules makes everything easier, and conformity is the natural state of things, because humans are social animals who need some sort of monolithic societies in order to function properly. They learn how to swallow pills without choking on them or getting the capsules stuck in their throats, because medication is important for all sorts of things.

They take two different pills at breakfast, one during lunch, and three after dinner before they go to bed, because sleep is crucially important for staying happy and healthy. Eight hours of sleep is required for children in school, because it’s the best amount to promote learning, but the minimum drops to six hours when you turn eighteen and get to graduate school and start working in the city.

Mikey doesn’t like the way the pills feel in his throat at first; he makes faces whenever their mother isn’t looking.

“It gets better with time, sweetheart,” she says reassuringly, after Gerard tells her that Mikey isn’t taking his medications. “But you have to take your meds, or you’ll get sick.”

She isn’t upset at Mikey, which isn’t fair because he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to and that’s supposed to be a bad thing, and Gerard sulks and looks away when Mikey sticks out his tongue meanly.

Sometimes Gerard likes to pretend that he’s a spy who’s been captured by terrorists who are trying to poison him, but they don’t know that he has the antidote to every poison ever invented hidden in the medication that he’s concealed in a secret pocket in his sleeve. When the terrorists aren’t paying attention to him, he pops open the compartment and swallows the pills dry because spies have to know how to do that sort of thing, and then he has the sudden strength to break the ropes holding him down and defeat his captors even without any weapons. He returns to Battery City triumphantly and everyone welcomes him as a hero, even Mikey, who is jealous because he doesn’t get that sort of attention from anyone. Mikey can be stupid sometimes.

The pills start off small, then get bigger as they grow older, because growing little boys need more nutritional supplements. Their mother explains this over breakfast, the way she explains most things. “Your hydration requirements increase too,” she points out.

Mikey kicks his feet against the plastic legs of the chair. _Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump_.

She always prepares their medications each morning, while they’re eating breakfast, before she goes to work and they go to school. Gerard likes to watch her while she uncaps pill bottles and tips the shiny capsules into her palm, then screws the lid back on and slips the pills into plastic bags that will end up in their lunch bags so they won’t have to worry about the medications getting wet and falling apart or anything like that. Stress isn’t healthy; that’s why they take pills for that. He’s seen the billboards: _There’s A Pill For That!_ He knows there is.

Sometimes the two of them will take an extra pill from a smaller bottle with kanji all over the label, but only if they’re going outside to somewhere like the park or a friend’s apartment in a different complex. Now that they’re a little older, their mother lets them leave the apartment complex without an adult supervising for more than just the trip to school and back, as well as more frequently if they want, as long as they stay together and don’t talk to strangers who aren’t Better Living Industries personnel.

They’ve both read about droids in school, about how artificial intelligence machinery has helped to make Battery City so prosperous, and there are helper droids that control the timetables at the Hub and places like that, but they haven’t actually seen any pornodroids before, even though Gerard knows they exist and he thinks probably Mikey does too because Mikey knows most things that Gerard knows. Pornodroids don’t go in the inner Sectors.

The weather is usually nice due to the city’s temp control systems. Even though it’s been raining for the past few days, it’s bright and the sun is warming up the concrete under their feet and they’re both sweating a little from the exertion of walking, squinting in the light reflecting off the white, white buildings and glass windows all around them. They’re walking home from school instead of taking the regular bus because Gerard got in trouble for fidgeting too much again and had to stay after school to make up the work he missed, and Mikey didn’t want to take the bus home on his own even though he could have, he’s old enough now that his passcard doesn’t require a chaperone to activate it anymore.

There’s a shortcut through one of the smaller Sectors that’s closer to the Lobby. Gerard doesn’t want to arrive later than usual and have to explain to their mother that he got in trouble, _again_ , especially now that he’s ten whole years old and should be able to hold still instead of feeling like he wants to itch out of his skin. Mikey is holding Gerard’s hand as they walk; he had loyally decided that he wanted to hurry home and get his homework done quickly so they have time to watch Mousekat both before _and_ after dinner, even though they’re not supposed to watch too much TV because it isn’t healthy for their eyes.

Mikey can talk a lot more now that he’s older, but he still doesn’t seem to mind just staying quiet and letting Gerard make up stories about the two of them going on all sorts of adventures.

Today, the adventures include the technology that was used during the Helium Wars—the atomic fission, the analog weaponry, the antique radio systems and machinery and vehicles—because Mikey likes hearing about those sorts of things. His Level had been learning about the Helium Wars in History that day.

At first Gerard thinks the pornodroid is just another citizen, a tall lady with a really pretty face, and almost doesn’t pay her any attention. The first thing he notices about her is that her hair is bright purple, cut short so that it doesn’t even come down to her shoulders. The length is standard, but the color isn’t; he’s never seen anyone with purple hair before. He likes it.

“G,” Mikey whispers, and pulls his arm so hard he almost stumbles.

It’s the purple hair that makes him pause and look at her properly. The lady is leaning slumped against the wall with her eyes shut. She isn’t moving at all, so he thinks at first that maybe she’s sleeping. She isn’t wearing headphones though, so she can’t be. That’s when he realizes that her skin is unnaturally pale, almost the same shade of white as the walls of their rooms, and she’s wearing shorts even though it’s chilly enough outside with the rain that their mother had made them both wear their heavier jackets before they left the apartment that morning.

Maybe she didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she was so tired she started to sleep right in the street. He knows, though, that she’s not sleeping; something about the way she’s slouched motionlessly against the brick wall makes him horribly uneasy. He tugs firmly on Mikey’s hand with a weird and unsettling feeling of urgency, and they hurry away.

Neither of them speaks until they get back to the house; he thinks, briefly and illogically, that maybe she would have woken up again if he had said something.

He didn’t want to try, though, because he doesn’t know what would happen if he had tried to wake her up and it hadn’t worked. He doesn’t want to think about that possibility.

Later, their mother comes into their room. She’s wearing her work clothes, the white uniform with the Better Living Industries smiling face on the pocket, and her hair is pulled back, regulation-neat. Loose hair could get caught in faulty machinery or distract the individual somehow.

Gerard is listening to static on his headphones and drawing a picture for Mikey with the colored pencils he got for his tenth birthday. It’s a picture _of_ Mikey, too, except Mikey is as tall as the tallest city buildings and can shoot fire out of his fingertips. There are scads of green monsters trying to fight him so they can take over Battery City and eat all the citizens, but Mikey’s kicking their scaly butts without any trouble since he’s the good guy and the good guys always come out on top when it’s all over, because they’re the good guys and that’s how it works. In the comic books that he’s not supposed to read but sometimes does anyway, that’s how it _always_ goes. Superheroes punching monsters. Heroes saving the world. Villains thwarted at the very last minute, caught just before their evil plots could be carried out. That’s how the story always ends.

The bad guys die and the good guys win.

Their mother sits down on the floor next to him and says gently, “Gerard, sweetie, your brother mentioned you saw a droid on the way home from school?”

Gerard doesn’t really know what that means, but he nods anyway, and thinks about the purple-haired lady leaning against the wall.

He thinks he probably should have tried to wake her up.

He knows they’re not supposed to go into the Lobby—their mother tells them all the time that there are dangerous people living there, and it’s not safe for them—but maybe they’re not supposed to walk by it, either.

He hopes Mikey doesn’t get in trouble, because Mikey didn’t do anything wrong, just went along with what Gerard was doing like always. Sometimes Mikey gets in trouble for things that weren’t his fault at all, because Gerard did them and Mikey did whatever Gerard did, but Mikey never says anything to his own defense, just nods and watches with his wide eyes.

The lady didn’t _look_ like a robot, at least not like the robots in the Mousekat cartoon where Mousekat has to rescue a group of kids from a gang of evil cyborgs that starved the kids _and_ wouldn’t let them take any of their meds either, so that when Mousekat finally rescued them, they were exhausted and sick and completely miserable. Mousekat had extra medications on hand, luckily, and that helped everyone to feel much better right away.

His mother brushes his hair out of his face like she used to when he was a baby. “Mom,” he whines, shaking his head so that his hair falls back down over his eyes the way he likes it, “’m not _five_.”

“I know, honey,” she says patiently. “The droids like the one you and your brother saw work in the Lobby, kind of like the droids that you’ve seen at the Hub, or in the outskirts of Battery City like I told you about before. They can help people with certain things sometimes, if you’re not married yet. You’ll understand what I mean when you’re a little bit older.”

He groans and fidgets with one of the colored pencils. It’s annoying to hear that sort of thing from her, because grown-ups always seem to say stuff like that.

Besides, he thinks. He _knows_ what pornodroids are. He’s not a baby anymore.

He shoves the pencils away petulantly. “Mikes,” he says. “C’mere, I finished it.”

Mikey gets up from where he was lying draped on his bed upside down, playing a game on his FlatScreen. He looks down at the drawing of him as a monster-fighting superhero, and says, “Cool,” in that tone of voice that means he does sincerely think it’s cool but doesn’t want to admit it.

Then he steals Gerard’s headphones and goes back to his bed and his game.

 _Brothers_ , Gerard thinks sulkily, and glares at the back of Mikey’s head. Mikey always says that Gerard’s headphones fit him better than his own, but that doesn’t mean he has to steal them all the time.

Gerard knows that their mother is planning to get Mikey new ones, but it’s a whole process to apply, not to mention the actual paperwork involved during the acclimation process once you finally _get_ the new headphones. Mikey likes listening to the white noise while he messes around on the webways on his FlatScreen or does his homework in the evenings. He says the noise is comforting, especially with the more difficult assignments.

History classes are mandatory no matter what grade level you’re in. There’s a special focus on one particular aspect that rotates every few months. Currently, Gerard’s class—Level Eight—is learning about the special police force and what it does to protect Battery City from any harm that might otherwise befall the citizens.

So far the coolest thing has been the day that there’s a formal presentation with special guests invited from Better Living Industries. He’s seen draculoids before, of course; it’s impossible not to. But he’s never been this close to one, and never in this sort of situation.

There are two draculoids, who stand at the front of the classroom and don’t say anything. They have on their patented masks, synthetic white plastic with garish red mouths and rubber teeth. They look like the vampires from which their name comes. They look like aliens, sent down to Earth to protect it from danger.

A woman in a neat white uniform gives the actual presentation, because the draculoids don’t, can’t, talk. He doesn’t actually know if they _can_ , but they never do, just make staticky grumbling noises sometimes, or weird throaty mumbles that sounds like growls.

The slides are dual-lang format like everything in Battery City, written in both English and Japanese. Their teacher explains that the woman works with the special task force SCARECROW.

She introduces herself as Exterminator Jameson.

The presentation itself is all about boring things like statistics and quotas and data, nothing cool like how many terrorists Exterminator Jameson got to beat up in the past month, or what happens if a draculoid needs to take a shower but can’t take off its mask, because everyone knows that once you put on a draculoid mask there’s no going back.

Mikey still calls them _draculas_ , Gerard thinks to himself; he can’t quite get his mouth to form the right word yet. He traces the kanji characters on his arm. _ドラクロイド_.

After what feels like an eternity of talking about boring things like facts and statistics and stuff that everyone already knows from the weekly safety reports on BLTV, Exterminator Jameson introduces her protégé, who she calls Exterminator Korse.

Exterminator Korse is eighteen, and he’s been working in the SCARECROW division for nearly three full months, which means he’s almost completed the mandatory training period before he can start working on his own for Better Living Industries. Gerard thinks he’s the most amazing person in the world.

He thinks, I could maybe be an Exterminator when I turn eighteen and get to have an actual job.

That would be impossibly cool.

There’s a question-and-answer portion, and Gerard raises his hand immediately, trying not to wiggle in his seat because he knows the teacher doesn’t like it when he fidgets too much. “Are there kids like me who were born in the desert!” he asks, when Exterminator Jameson points at him.

She looks over towards Exterminator Korse, who shuffles his feet a little before he answers. He clears his throat. “Yes,” he says.

Gerard has heard about the terrorist activity in the desert before, but this is the first time he’s really old enough to pay attention to the details. And he’s never heard about it from actual Exterminators. This is the sort of stuff his and Mikey’s father got to deal with every day when he worked for SCARECROW.

He almost can’t breathe from excitement.

The terrorists don’t want anything coherent or cohesive, they just want to cause as much trouble as they can get away with.

“Some people just want to cause senseless chaos because they think it’s fun,” Korse explains in a monotone. “They have damaged minds; they don’t have any way to regulate their emotions, and the radiation still lingering in the desert makes them even sicker.”

Better Living Industries could eradicate them, of course, but they don’t because they want to give everyone a chance to return to the city to learn to be valued(/valuable) citizens again, whether the terrorists in question deserve a second chance or not.

The terrorists mostly aren’t interested in normal, comfortable lives; they want to make things more difficult for themselves and for everyone else involved, because they don’t know any better.

Gerard thinks about what it would be like for kids born in the desert. Maybe some of them are his age or even Mikey’s age, and they would never know anything but the desert and the radiation and all that kind of stuff.

He thinks about the rehabilitation programs that are specifically for reformed terrorists and raises his hand again.

“Yes?”

“Would those kids be let in too? Like even if they were never citizens before,” he clarifies.

Exterminator Jameson nods, and reminds him that Better Living Industries makes its their mission to accept everyone—they don’t discriminate on basis of gender or race or physical ability or anything like that, so why would they turn someone away just because the person in question was born somewhere other than the city?

Not everyone is as lucky as the kids in Gerard’s class, Korse says, chastising, and Gerard blushes. He tries to remember not to fidget too much.

He knows he’s lucky, having been born in Battery City, where everywhere is safe and everyone is happy and everything is _better_. He can’t imagine ever leaving. Not without Mikey there too, at least, because the two of them always stick together no matter what, even when Mikey is being infuriating.

When he goes to collect Mikey at the end of the day so that the two of them can walk home together like they always do, and also so he can tell Mikey everything about what happened during the day before he explodes with all the pent-up excitement, he finds Mikey sitting on the floor and talking to some kid Gerard doesn’t know, who must be in Mikey’s class. The new kid has short fluffy brown hair and a big smile, and he waves at Gerard when he walks up to them.

The kid says cheerily, “Hi, you must be Mikey’s older brother, I’m Ray and I’m eight and I wanna be a scientist when I’m older, so I can go to space.”

Gerard blinks at him. “Okay. I’m, uh, I’m Gerard, and that’s Mikey. But I guess you already knew that.”

He knows that Mikey must have passed a positive judgement on Ray, because the only way Ray would have known Mikey as _Mikey_ and not _Michael_ is if Mikey told him, and he only does that to people he approves of, who are few and far between. Even their mother doesn’t call him _Mikey_ , most of the time. That name is usually reserved for Gerard, the same way only Mikey can call him _G_.

Ray just keeps beaming brightly, even when Gerard folds his arms and scowls at him threateningly. Gerard is reminded of the perpetual smiling face logo stamped on all Better Living products, except Ray’s smile looks different, for some reason.

He doesn’t know _why_ , it just feels different.

Mikey gives him a look that could be kind of judgmental, except it’s Mikey and everything he does looks kind of judgmental. Gerard says witheringly, “People haven’t been to space in for _ever_ , you know.”

“I’m gonna be the first,” Ray says, determined.

He still hasn’t stopped smiling. Gerard throws a look over at Mikey, who doesn’t seem surprised by Ray’s declaration. Mikey scuffs his shoe against the floor and says, “D’you think that Ray could come over today, like when we’re all done with our homework and school stuff?”

There really isn’t anything disagreeable about Ray, but Gerard is ten years old and impatient and kind of jealous even though he knows he shouldn’t be, so he points out, a bit snottily, that their mother probably wouldn’t be _too_ thrilled at the idea of inviting over strange new kids whose families she hasn’t met yet.

Besides, he reminds Mikey, they’re not _supposed_ _to_ talk to strangers.

He privately doesn’t think Ray counts in that rule, and he does feel a little bad when both Ray’s and Mikey’s faces fall, but he also doesn’t want to back down now, not when his pride is at stake.

Mikey gives in first because Mikey always gives in first, and says a perfunctory goodbye to his new friend, following which Ray bounces off cheerfully to entertain himself, leaving Mikey and Gerard to start off together for home.

On the way back to the house, Mikey talks a little bit about what he learned in his classes that day—their focus had been on the history of medications and the use of artificially generated supplements when the body’s functions required additional support, all that kind of boring stuff that they have to know about before they can graduate and get real jobs. Gerard allows this for a few minutes, then launches into the story of his own day, and doesn’t shut about what _he_ learned in class, with all the Better Living employees and the women in white with clipboards and the draculoids and Exterminator Jameson and Exterminator Korse, who work in the SCARECROW division. Mikey still hero-worships his older brother, so he doesn’t mind that much; to him, Gerard is the coolest person in the entire world.

He doesn’t tell anybody about the nightmares, not even Mikey, because for some reason he doesn’t feel like he would be able to explain them.

They don’t start out like nightmares. Usually he’s just lying in his bed like he was when he fell asleep, but then the room starts changing in small ways, so small that he doesn’t notice the differences at first. Then the real changes happen—Mikey’s bed vanishes, and the ceiling turns into the night sky, but there aren’t any stars like there are above the city.

That’s always how he knows it’s a dream, when the stars blink out of existence like someone’s turned off a master switch.

The droid appears next.

He knows it’s a droid because of the eyes. There’s no light behind them, just emptiness.

 _You’re not going to wake me up_ , the droid says. Its voice sounds like the creaking noise of rusty hinges. _You’re not going to save them_.

He doesn’t know how to respond to that. He thinks, I’m sorry? I think?

The droid chuckles, gears grinding. _You don’t know why I’m appearing like this, do you? I didn’t want to scare you_.

He lifts his chin. I’m not afraid of you, he thinks.

_You would be. You don’t even believe in me._

You’re a dream, he thinks stubbornly. Dreams can’t hurt me.

 _I can’t hurt you in your dreams, not physically_ , the droid agrees. _But you’ve never met me in real life, have you, and you know what Better Living always says—what you CAN see CAN’T hurt you_.

He wakes up clutching the covers to his chin, frightened.

The ceiling is just a ceiling. The stars are immobile in their positions in the sky.

He breathes out slowly.

Sometimes Gerard sits with his mother on the couch and watches BLTV’s Fact News (“Your only channel for all the news you’ll ever need!”) on the TV after dinner. Fact News is a good thing because if there’s only one channel that provides all the news, everybody can be informed, and information is something that can help people. That’s why there are mandatory television viewing times, and why everyone has to wear headphones all the time unless they’re in school or working within Better Living Industries.

Today the program is focusing on the fact that it’s the anniversary of the day the Great Fires were finally extinguished. The Great Fires happened a long time ago, before he was even born, but they almost destroyed the entirety of California. Between the fires and the Helium Wars going on at the same time, the world nearly ended. It’s only thanks to Better Living Industries that it didn’t.

He doesn’t understand most of what the telecasters say on the news, but on rare occasions the Director makes an appearance to talk about some new modification made to some new medication, or something like that.

The Director’s name is Airi Takahashi, and she’s kind of scary, but also undeniably pretty amazing. Her face looks really sharp, like if you tried to touch her you could cut yourself, but her eyes seem nice, just like his mother’s eyes when she’s putting them to bed.

It’s weird, sometimes. He doesn’t know what to think of her.

Sometimes she talks about Battery City, and describes the meaning behind the whole thing, and says that all the pastel colors and the white noise and the lack of neon is to render the world hollow and light like a bird’s egg.

You remove everything unnecessary and focus on what _is_ necessary.

Solid colors are the purest, the least harmful. The absence of bright or flashy or mixed colors leaves the end result nice and clean and simple. Patterns are distracting. Solid colors are best. You discard hindrance; embrace simplicity. Focus on the present, instead of a potential future of uncertainty that could induce increased stress hormones. The past can’t be changed; the present is the primary focus. The aftermath is secondary.

Gerard thinks that sort of makes sense, but it still gets a little annoying when he wants to draw him and Mikey fighting zombies or whatever monster that day calls for, and he has to make all the blood pale pink because that’s the color of the crayons instead of bright and shocking red, like it is in real life when he trips and scrapes his knee on the concrete, or when Mikey and Ray accidentally smack their heads together while playing space aliens and end up bleeding all over their clothes and their mother freaks out.

***

For Mikey’s tenth birthday, he gets a digital camera. He’s never shown any interest in photography before, so he isn’t sure at first why the gift makes sense, but once he tries it out he discovers he likes it immensely. He can take photographs on his FlatScreen, but it’s different because the primary purpose of the FlatScreen is playing games or looking up stuff on the webways sometimes, and the primary purpose of a camera is taking pictures.

He’s read about old cameras, and super antique stuff like Betamax and VHS and Kindles, which were early versions of his FlatScreen. He knows it would be basically impossible to get his hands on tech that’s that outdated, but he still wants to know how they worked. He doesn’t quite know how the FlatScreen itself works, but he wants to figure it out. The biggest problem is that his mother stubbornly won’t let him take it apart so he can look at the internal workings.

Once he starts taking pictures of everything he can, he almost can’t stop, except when he’s in class and isn’t allowed.

He takes a picture of Gerard slouched over the table while eating breakfast before school.

He takes a picture of Ray waving his hands as he tries to explain some complicated science-y thing.

He takes a picture of their mother smiling at him, wearing the wonderful soft striped shirt, with her hair pulled back.

The camera can print out the photographs onto special paper that costs a lot of extra carbons that he has to save up for, because the usual allotment of carbons only covers food and clothes when they’re needed and school supplies and medications. The paper is sleek and glossy, and even though the pictures only print in black and white, it looks awesome. He tapes the sheets of paper with the photos on them to the wall next to his bed so he can look at them when he wakes up every morning.

Growing up means a lot of cool new things, but it also means a lot more homework. Mikey doesn’t like to complain, because he knows his mother is stressed because of something that’s happening at work that she won’t explain, and besides, Gerard complains enough for the both of them anyway. Their mother says it’s part of being a teenager. Mikey thinks it’s just part of Gerard being annoying.

Homework makes his head hurt all the time and reading makes the headaches even worse. Sometimes he manages to convince Gerard to read his assignments to him, but Gerard usually just gets distracted and forgets he’s supposed to be reading out loud. Listening to calming white noise in his headphones helps the headaches sometimes, but not always. He doesn’t like talking about it because he doesn’t really know what to say. A lot of the time it’s just easier to let Gerard do the talking; Gerard always knows what he means, anyway. Except Gerard doesn’t seem to get the same headaches, so he can’t explain this time.

He finally tells their mother about the problem when the headphones stop helping at all. Their mother presses her lips together and says she thinks it’s probably time to them to visit the doctor again.

They visit the doctor three times a year anyway, but this time it’s different. Their mother calls the doctor’s office using the phone that they’re not supposed to touch; they don’t get to overhear most of the conversation, but it doesn’t sound good. Mikey sits on the kitchen floor next to his brother and decides he feels nervous.

Normally, if Gerard or Mikey gets sick, they can just take a couple of pills and stay in bed for an extra day and eat some of the special we-only-get-to-eat-this-when-we’re-sick soup that their mother gets from the tallest cabinet and heats up on the stove. It doesn’t really taste like anything different from normal canned soup, but it always makes them feel better, so it’s good.

Mikey is understandably worried that he’s done something wrong by complaining about the headaches. He didn’t want there to be any trouble, which is why he didn’t mention the problem before. Probably it isn’t actually a real problem, just an overexaggeration that he’s picked up from spending all his time with Gerard.

He’s ten whole years old, so he won’t admit to anyone that he’s scared, but he still holds tight to Gerard’s hand in the waiting room until the receptionist smiles at them and says they can come together to one of the rooms in the back.

But everything turns out okay, because all the doctor does is check his medication prescriptions for irregularities and do some basic vision tests on him. The vision tests are kind of scary and make his head feel funny and blurry, but Gerard is right there and his mother is right there, so it isn’t that bad.

The doctor looks over his paperwork briefly, then says, “Good news is that it’s nothing too expensive or extensive, the boy just needs some basic glasses. When he’s a little older, we can do some vision correction surgeries to fix the problem permanently, but in the meantime there’s no shame in needing a little help to keep things rolling along smoothly—if there were, we wouldn’t have invented glasses in the first place, hah!”

“See, dummy, you’re _fine_ ,” says Gerard, and elbows him sharply in the side.

So it’s all okay in the end.

Mikey relaxes somewhat after the doctor takes him back into the fitting room and shows him all the options he apparently has that really all look the same, and then something else happens that he doesn’t really remember because he’s so relieved not to be in trouble, but he still doesn’t let go of Gerard’s hand until they’re all out of the building with the new glasses in a special protective case.

The glasses make Mikey look even smaller than before, somehow, like he’s trying to shrink into himself and be as unobtrusive as possible. His eyes look even larger behind the circular glass, round and curious. He looks smaller, but Gerard doesn’t tell him that. He knows that he wouldn’t be able to explain how he doesn’t mean it to be a bad thing, and he doesn’t want Mikey to get upset.

The morning after the magic of the new glasses, Mikey wakes up earlier than usual and something feels wrong.

At first he doesn’t pinpoint what it is that feels out of place—the first coherent thought in his head is that the apartment feels too _empty_ , but he knows that’s ridiculous because he can hear Gerard’s breathing in the bed across from him, and it’s not like every room is cluttered or anything in the first place. The familiar sound of the artificial temperature control system is still whirring away like usual.

Something just feels off.

He slides out of bed and wraps the top blanket around himself before he pads quietly down the stairs.

The humming of the temp controls doesn’t change. He catches a brief flash of red-and-yellow light out of the corner of his eye, through the window; like headlights, like a car driving past, except it’s past automotive curfew for any vehicle that isn’t the garbage trucks or food distribution caravans, and those don’t use headlights because it could disturb residential sleep cycles. He thinks maybe he saw something, or heard something, and that’s why he woke up. A quick blinking light, a low rumble of an engine. He doesn’t know.

The lights are all turned off, except for the constant inexplicable glow of the city itself, coming through the windows that falls on the kitchen counter and lends enough luminosity to the room that Mikey can creep over to the panel of switches on the wall and throw the right one without any trouble.

It makes a loud clicking sound that echoes in the empty kitchen.

The light is too bright at first, and it hurts his eyes.

He realizes then that he left his new glasses on the nightstand in between their two beds.

So he goes back to their room and crawls onto Gerard’s bed, the blanket still wrapped over his shoulders like a cape, like how Gerard sometimes draws them both as superheroes fighting evil together. Thinking about fighting monsters with his brother helps him to feel a lot better, even if Mikey currently feels like the farthest thing from a superhero.

Gerard is still sleeping.

He’s snoring a little; Mikey thinks, _ha!_ because Gerard always says that Mikey’s the one who snores.

The blinking LED numbers on the alarm clock on the nightstand next to the bed say it’s 04:19 in the morning.

Mikey pats Gerard’s face carefully with his hand and whispers, “Gerard? G, G, wake up.”

“’M sl’pn,” Gerard mumbles in protest, and rolls over. He pulls at the blankets a little, giving Mikey enough room to get into the bed under the covers too, if he wants. His voice slurs a little. “Hey, hey Mikes, Mikey, c’mere. Did y’have a—a—a bad dream or someth’n?”

Mikey shakes his head, which Gerard catches, because his eyes are open now, wide and huge in the low, steady light. But he keeps holding onto the edge of the blanket like he’s beckoning, waiting, and finally Mikey gives in and crawls underneath the covers next to his brother. Gerard rolls back onto his side, and Mikey curls into his chest, listening to the steady sound of Gerard’s heart beating as his breath evens out again.

They both wake up again when the alarm goes off for real at 07:30.

The morning sun is shining through the windows, brighter than imaginary, implausible headlights or the nighttime city light.

Gerard groans loudly and smacks the button to turn it off, then sits up, his hair sticking wildly out all over the place. He yawns and stretches, and his shirt pulls up, showing some of his belly. He tugs it back down, and looks over at Mikey, who’s still curled up underneath the combined blankets from both beds. “You okay?”

Mikey shrugs.

He doesn’t really feel like saying anything. A lot of the time it’s easier just to let Gerard talk for him; Gerard always knows what he means.

He thinks, if anyone would know what’s wrong, it would be Gerard.

He thinks, maybe there isn’t anything wrong.

Maybe they’ll go downstairs and the lights will be on like normal and their mother will be making breakfast, preparing lunches for both of them, preparing herself for work. Maybe he was just imagining hearing a car, seeing headlights, dreaming.

Things feel better with Gerard there, for a little while, but then they make it downstairs—Gerard still yawning and rubbing at his eyes—and all traces of good feeling abruptly dissipate. The lights are all still turned off, except for the one in the kitchen that Mikey had turned on when he came downstairs the first time. Their mother is nowhere to be seen.

Gerard says, “Where’s mom?”

They’ve woken up alone in an apartment that suddenly feels too big for two small boys. The curtains stay shut, even though the sun is hovering hazily over Battery City’s rooftops and skyscrapers. The door to their mother’s bedroom stays shut; Gerard had hesitantly crept over and turned the knob, peering inside as though he would find their mother in her bed—which would be, in of itself, a cause for alarm, since her work shift starts soon and she’s never late because good work ethic is important for maintaining health and interpersonal relationships—but there’s nothing there. The bed doesn’t even look slept in. There are no personal belongings on the dresser or hanging on the walls like Mikey’s photographs above his bed.

They don’t have a way to call anyone besides the house phone that they’re not supposed to touch. Even if they _did_ , there’s not anyone they could contact to help them. They’ve never had to call in a draculoid patrol before, because there’s never been any real trouble in their Sector of the city.

Neither of them knows what to do.

Finally, Gerard kind of shrugs with one shoulder, the way he always does when he doesn’t want to admit he’s feeling more than he’s letting on, and says, “I guess we should go to school.”

They eat their breakfast (leftovers from the night before). They make their school lunches (sandwiches and protein cubes). Gerard finds their mother’s purse sitting untouched on the table, which has never happened before, and takes out five carbons to use as bus fare—three for him, two for Mikey.

Then they gather their books and go. There really aren’t any better alternatives.

Gerard doesn’t want to think about the possibility that their mother would have been taken.

He thinks about it anyway.

He thinks, taken by _whom_?

They don’t have any enemies, because nobody does. He thinks, almost with a scoff and a touch of scorn, that he’s old enough now to know the difference between the fantasy in the Mousekat episodes on the television and the un-chaotic reality outside the screen.

It just doesn’t make any _sense_.

The day passes slower than any day in the world has ever passed. Gerard goes to four classes that last an hour each and absorbs absolutely none of the material covered. He manages to swallow about a quarter of his sandwich before he has to stop because he feels like he’s going to throw up if he keeps eating.

He takes one of the purple relaxation pills that he stuck in his bag that morning, and that helps, but only for a brief while before the anxiety is back in sickening swoops and his stomach feels tight and poisoned.

Luckily, he remembered to pack his usual medications along with his lunch, and even though Mikey hasn’t been in charge of getting _his_ meds prepared each day, Gerard’s watched their mother go through the little bottles of pills enough times that he could get Mikey’s meds ready too that morning.

He doesn’t like having the responsibility, even if he knows he can do it. It feels like he’s replacing their mother.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity, the school day is over, and he hurries over to the building where Mikey is waiting for him, sitting on the steps with Ray like usual.

Gerard has a brief flash of nauseating panic—he doesn’t know how he would begin to explain things if Mikey’s told Ray anything—but Ray looks as happily oblivious as he normally does, so Gerard relaxes a little. Then he’s abruptly disgusted with himself.

“Mikes,” he says, and his voice sounds weird, even to his own ears. It’s too harsh and too loud. “Come on, we should get home.”

Neither of them really wants to go home to an empty apartment, but the more time Gerard spends in the presence of other people, the more he feels like screaming. He wants to go home and listen to white noise and he wants to curl up in bed and he wants to cry and he wants his mom to come back.

And Mikey doesn’t know what to do, so he just nods mutely and waves goodbye to Ray as he follows Gerard towards the Hub to get on the bus.

There’s a little yellow light flashing on the answering machine when they get back, signifying a new voice message on the don’t-touch-this-boys-unless-it’s-an-emergency-I-mean-it phone. Gerard thinks, this probably constitutes an emergency, and has to stop himself from laughing out loud, because what the hell.

Mikey looks at him nervously and says, “Should we listen to it?”

“I don’t suppose anyone else is going to,” Gerard mumbles. He doesn’t want to think about it, even after he’s said it.

The message turns out to be from the cheerful receptionist at the doctor’s office (Building B7, Sector 5), reminding them of their joint periodical checkup to ensure that they’re on the right level of medications, that they wouldn’t benefit from additional therapy or adjustment, that they’re not horribly ill and in need of immediate medical attention, and all that kind of unhealthy stuff. The receptionist closes the message by reminding them both to _have a better day!_

The appointment is in three days, in the early morning, before school starts. It’s only supposed to be an hour long for both sessions; they should be able to take the bus to the doctor’s and still make it to school on time. Probably this was planned in advance.

Mikey says, “I kinda think we have to just go. Or maybe Mom will get back soon.”

Gerard shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.”

The next three days are the longest three days in the world, because they’re also mostly a weekend. On Saturday afternoon, Gerard finally gets restless enough that he can’t stand just lying in bed listening to meaningless background noise with his headphones and trying so hard not to lose it, and he drags Mikey outside to do something, anything, it doesn’t matter what, just something other than stagnating helplessly inside the house.

They kick rocks around aimlessly for a little while, and Mikey makes small talk with one of the neighbor ladies who’s recently married, and then it starts raining and they have go back inside anyway.

The sky is a darker shade of gray than usual, and it’s cold enough outside that they’re both shivering and pretending they’re not.

Mikey curls up on the couch in the main room, small as anything, and pulls the blankets up to his shoulders. He looks so much younger than he is.

Gerard bustles about for a moment in the kitchen getting some hot water together for tea or something, but he can’t remember the way their mother usually makes it. The tea ends up tasting too strong and not sweet enough, but Mikey still wraps his hands gratefully around the mug from underneath the pile of blankets in his makeshift nest.

“I can adjust the temp controls if you’re cold,” Gerard offers, but Mikey just shakes his head slightly.

“’M fine, just tired.”

Gerard shrugs. “Whatever,” he says, and sits down on the couch, tucking his feet under his legs. _He_ isn’t that cold, but he knows sometimes Mikey won’t admit if he is.

Mikey stares down at the steam curling from his mug for a while before he looks up again and says quietly, “Hey, G. Could you tell me a story?”

“Um,” says Gerard, surprised. He wasn’t expecting that. “I mean, um, yeah.”

He thinks fleetingly of telling one of his usual stories about superheroes or monsters or magic, but he doesn’t think he’d be able to do it justice.

So instead he sits on the couch next to Mikey and tells him everything he can remember that their mother used to tell him about the world outside the city, outside the solid monochrome heart of the nation—the desert, the radiation, the wars, the myths of neutral people who live in the _Zones_ and aren’t terrorists, the sun that shines bright and hot and the acid rain that melts your flesh if it touches your skin and the radiation that makes you sicker and sicker the stronger it is. He tries to explain what he imagines the sand would feel like (like touching a smooth brick wall, except all in little pieces, like incredibly small beads), and he knows it doesn’t really come across the way he wants it to, but Mikey just nods along obligingly and doesn’t say anything.

He looks so small, like he could shrink into the couch cushions and disappear if Gerard looked away for too long.

He looks scared.

“You know we don’t need anyone, right?” says Gerard, and hugs Mikey to his chest, careful not to spill the still-full mug of tea. “We don’t need anyone except each other, you know that, right?”

Mikey doesn’t say anything to affirm or deny the statement, but he holds on a little bit tighter, and breathes shakily into the soft warm fabric of Gerard’s shirt.

He has another nightmare that night. This time the droid is smoking something, sitting back in a plastic chair with its legs crossed at the ankles. It doesn’t have biorealistic skin like the other droids he’s seen; the gray metal is unnerving. It looks like the pre-war droids from history textbooks—synthetic, faceless. Without sympathy.

The droid is wearing a shirt he recognizes, soft and striped.

That’s my mom’s clothes, he tries to say, clenching his fists. He doesn’t know what the dream will let him do, what the limits are, but he suddenly wants to punch the droid right between its hollow eyes. He wants to yell, give my mom back her shirt and leave me alone! but he can’t move his mouth.

 _This is your dream_ , says the droid, exhaling a clinging fog-cloud of smoke. _Fix it, motorbaby_.

He screws his eyes shut so he doesn’t start crying. He’s too old to cry over something stupid like this.

He thinks, I don’t want to deal with this, it’s stupid, I just want my mom to come back.

 _Oh,_ the droid says thoughtfully. _It’s a bit too late for that, isn’t it?_

They both know how to take the transit system across town, whether it’s to school or to the doctor or to a friend’s house. There’s a Hub at the end of their street, and from there the bus goes straight into the center of Battery City, with periodic stops along the way.

The city is divided into Sectors, with the main Better Living Industries building in the very center. The spider at the middle of the web.

The inner city is reserved for the employees and their families, and the outer city is for the rest of the citizens. Beyond the outer Sector is the Lobby, which is where the city starts to break off from the scrubbed-clean white walls the inner Sectors boast. That’s where the sharp white façade starts to decay, to crumble a little.

The Lobby is where the pornodroids reside, where you can get cheap emotion-altering pills and go to droid clubs to dance and drink and party, where the black-market music industry is booming. You can get fucked or you can get fucked up, depending on your mood.

But most citizens don’t know the details of what goes on in the slums of the Lobby, just that it’s somewhere to avoid if you have any shred of sense or decency.

It’s just not a pleasant place to be, unless you’re a certain type of person, and that certain type of person isn’t popular within the innermost Sectors. The inner city is for the cleaned-up purity of Better Living Industries and the elite citizens of Battery City.

The doctor’s office (he thinks, almost desperately: Building B7, Sector 5) is right next to one of the big BL-HQ buildings in Battery Towers, with the giant smiling logo gleaming in pale white neon from above.

It doesn’t look like a nice smile.

Building B7 not far from their school, actually, which is somewhat of a comfort because it’s a familiar sight. Mikey hasn’t let go of his brother’s hand since they first set foot out of the house that morning.

Normally Gerard would complain that he’s too old to be holding hands like a _baby_ , but he doesn’t say anything about it. He knows Mikey’s scared. He’s scared too.

He leads them up to the desk at the front of the waiting room.

The signs are dual-lang like usual. The sharp spiky characters make his head hurt; he can’t focus on reading them.

The lady seated behind the desk doesn’t look up when they walk over. She’s typing something on an old keyboard, but she isn’t wearing headphones, so she must be there to assist patients somehow. He hesitates. “Excuse me?”

She doesn’t react. He repeats himself in Japanese. “ _Sumimasen_?”

He can imagine the kanji floating in the air in front of his face: _すみません_.

She still doesn’t move. He says hesitantly, biting the edge of his fingernail, “I think we have, um, we have an appointment today?”

She looks up at them, then, and smiles with a quick flash of bright white teeth. “Absolutely! I hope you’ve both having a better day! I’ll get you two signed in if you could just tell me your names really quick, so I can take you to see the doctor.”

Then the cheerful receptionist is there and takes them both back into another waiting room to see the doctor, and the walls are bright white and almost hurt to look at. The lady from the front desk takes them into separate rooms, and the doctor comes in with a smile and a clipboard and a bottle of little green pills.

That’s all they remember for a while.

***

When Gerard can focus on anything more than gray static behind his eyelids and soft white noise in his ears, the receptionist is bending over him, saying, “It’s all right, you haven’t been out for longer than a few minutes, that’s normal, and actually pretty common after this sort of routine treatment. Your brother woke up a couple of minutes ago, and your father is here to take you both home whenever you’re ready.”

He doesn’t know exactly what’s happened, but the sky outside the small window in the hallway leading back to the waiting room is dark, so he knows he was in fact unconscious for a while. He wonders, why would the receptionist lie? and then stops pondering that, because it makes his head hurt, just _trying_ to think about it.

He thinks, we must have missed school, but that hurts to think about too, so he gives up. He has an itchy feeling that he’s forgetting something, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Mikey is sitting in the waiting room, kicking his feet absently and listening to something on his headphones, and there’s someone sitting next to him.

That must be our father, Gerard thinks, and then he thinks, _of course it is_ , and his head starts hurting again.

He voices this, rubbing at his eyes to try to dispel the ache, and the lady from the front desk kindly gives him a glass of water and a small pill that will help to get rid of the headache, which is apparently also “common after such kinds of routine treatment.”

He swallows the pill obediently. The water is room temperature but still soothing on his dry throat.

The pill does help the headache to go away, but it also makes him sleepy, and he falls asleep somewhere during the bus ride back home and only wakes up again when his father is putting him and Mikey to bed.

He doesn’t dream about the infuriating droid that night, which is relieving.

The day feels intangible. When he wakes up the next morning, he isn’t sure if any of it actually happened; his skin doesn’t feel like it’s real. It feels like the biorealistic plastic tissue that covers the metal bones of droids. His head still hurts if he tries to think about it, so he files the confusion and hazy memories away somewhere deep in the back of his brain, where he can worry about it later.

Gerard is fifteen, and Mikey is almost thirteen, when something happens.

Better Living Industries has an exceedingly complex view of art that can be summarized by a schism: art, while not inherently _good_ or _bad_ , can be good if used properly by good people, and bad if used improperly by bad people, and so on. Examples of “good” art include realistic grayscale paintings of historical figures such as old Japanese leaders, or classical Greek and Roman statues of athletes carved from marble or granite with artfully draped cloth.

There are only two museums in the city, one of which is a history museum about the Helium Wars, packed with long droning plaques full of lists of names and statistics.

The other museum is a moderately large building with a high vaulted ceiling and white tile floors with black trim. It houses a brief history of approved art throughout the ages.

Gerard sometimes ends up taking the bus to the latter museum after school, on days when Mikey goes back to Ray’s house so that the two of them can work on the homework assigned in their own grade level or hang out and gossip about things in their own grade level or whatever else they get up to. Their father seems pleased that Mikey is making friends, or at least one friend. Sometimes he tries to ask Gerard if _he_ has any friends, but those conversations don’t make much progress beyond surface questions. Gerard hasn’t really thought that much about the idea of being friends with people in his own classes at school or anywhere else—he has Mikey, and by extension Ray. He doesn’t need or want anything besides that.

The statues are his favorite part of the museum. Sometimes he tries to imagine what they would look like splashed with color, even though he knows that they were created to be solid colors, strong and simple.

These statues are heralded as the ideal of “good” art. Most of the statues are from an ancient civilization known as _Rome_ , which was destroyed centuries before modern society was established.

There aren’t many books about art history, but Gerard’s research lets him learn that Rome was actually pretty similar to modern-day life in Battery City. The government had multiple values and practices that Battery City employs in the modern day as well. There was a lot more religion going on, though, which is weird to think about.

He knows that most of the droids that live in places like the Lobby believe in some sort of deity, but he doesn’t know the details because all his textbooks say is that it’s a primitive religion, which is just a fancy way of saying that it isn’t important.

He can’t imagine believing in something like that.

Reading and learning about the history of the art and the museums makes him happy, happier than he’s felt in—a long time.

He hasn’t really been feeling like something is missing in his life until he starts to fill that void and it suddenly makes itself painfully known.

He tries to explain this to Mikey, fumbling and awkward with his words, while Mikey just sits there and blinks owlishly at him. “It’s like, I didn’t know I was missing something,” Gerard says, knowing how inarticulate he must sound and internally cringing, “because I didn’t know what I _could_ be missing, you know?”

Mikey just shrugs, like he couldn’t care either way, but the next morning at breakfast their father informs Gerard that he will be attending a therapy session at the doctor’s offices (he thinks: Building B7, Sector 5) later that afternoon.

“To preclude any dangerous thoughts about illegal activities,” says their father, like he’s rehearsed the phrase in case Gerard tries to protest.

He doesn’t protest. He tries to look at Mikey, but Mikey doesn’t make eye contact with him, just looks down at his breakfast glumly, and turns his plastic fork over in his hand, again and again.

Gerard considers being angry at Mikey for telling on him and for not looking at him, but it’s a fleeting possibility. He can’t be angry at Mikey.

Mostly he’s just worried about what will happen at the therapy session. He doesn’t know what to expect from the visit.

He realizes numbly that he’s frightened.

The doctor takes him to a room with a medical cot and a stainless-steel table and folds his hands so that his fingers are all twisted together and looks directly at Gerard with a warm and reassuring smile on his face.

He says, “I hope you’re having a better day so far!”

“I guess,” says Gerard, trying not to squirm in his seat.

He isn’t supposed to fidget.

“Well, then,” says the doctor, unfolding his fingers conspiratorially. Gerard thinks, I probably knew his name at some point. Probably he’s just forgotten it. “Your father tells me that you’ve been researching some history of illegal art and artistry recently?”

Gerard shrugs.

He doesn’t really want to say anything in case he says something wrong. He’s seen the pamphlets warning parents about the dangerous influences of illegal art, and he doesn’t think he had crossed that line, but maybe he had. Maybe they’ll say he can’t go back to the museum ever again, or maybe they’ll do something to Mikey.

That’s the worst option imaginable, that they would be separated.

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” the doctor says, as though reading his mind, “we’re just going to adjust your medication to make sure that you’re happy and smiling! People who feel dissatisfied, especially young people, often seek out potentially unhealthy activities as a form of asking for help. It’s not a bad thing, to be feeling this way, it just signals that your brain needs a slight adjustment. It isn’t something to be worried about or ashamed of; everyone has rough days.”

“Oh,” says Gerard, without really meaning to say anything. He didn’t think he was asking for help, but maybe he was, without intending it.

“It’s okay,” says the doctor, soothing. “We have some things that can help you. Don’t worry about it, Gerard, we can take it from here. This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered a situation like yours.”

The doctor leads him out of the room and down a long white hallway and into another white room, which contains a machine that the doctor tells him is called the Tube.

There’s a small plaque above the door leading into the room that reads _Adolescent Correctional Facility_ , which sounds like it should be painful. He doesn’t say this aloud, but the doctor must see it in his eyes. He pats Gerard’s shoulder comfortingly and says, “It’s a simple procedure, really—a combination of electronic hypnosis therapy and mental rewiring. Sometimes things aren’t working the way we want or need them to be, so we have to go in and fix them up. It’s that easy! And then you’ll really be able to live better, how’s that sound?”

“Okay,” he says. All the white is starting to make his head hurt again. He walks into the room—there’s a plastic viewing window through which he can see the doctor making notes on a device that looks like Mikey’s FlatScreen—and waits nervously. He doesn't want it to be painful.

“Look at the screen, Gerard,” the doctor says kindly.

It isn’t painful. It’s more like going to sleep after a very long day.

The droid isn’t smoking this time, just wearing a long, faded pink bathrobe and looking around the landscape as though expecting something dramatic to happen. It looks like a wasteland; he can see the skyscrapers of Battery City rising in the distance, almost obscured by grayish-green smog. There’s trash scattered about—old bottles, plastic containers, scraps of fabric and paper.

 _Well, kid, you really fucked it up this time_ , the droid says morosely, and kicks a glass bottle with one rusting metal foot.

They both watch as the bottle rolls to a stop some ways away.

I didn’t mean to, he thinks. I don’t know why you always act like I did something wrong.

The droid pokes desolately at a plastic takeout container. _Nah, probably you don’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m no saint myself, but then again, I’m all in your head. So really you should be asking yourself that question_.

He thinks, if this is all in my head, aren’t I asking myself already?

 _Clever_. The droid nudges over another container with its metal toes, watching it bounce away across the heaps of garbage. _You still don’t believe in me, but that doesn’t matter. You’re not somewhere that I can watch over you anymore_.

I don’t need watching over, he wants to say. His lips don’t move.

There’s rotting fruit and vegetables underfoot as well, he realizes. His sneakers squish unpleasantly whenever he moves; the smell is suddenly overpowering. He pulls the collar of his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose, eyes watering, and glances back at the hazy outline of Battery City. It almost seems to be glowing, reflective, like there’s an invisible forcefield just barely surrounding it.

 _No, I don’t suppose you do_ , the droid ponders, shaking its head jerkily back and forth, like its joints are in need of more grease. _But sometimes it’s nice to have someone looking out for you anyway, isn’t it?_

He notices almost absently that most of the trash on the ground is marked with the signature yellow-and-black stickers that designate the products as irradiated.

When he wakes up he feels sort of disoriented, and he can’t remember what happened during the session, but the doctor reassures him that the feeling will go away after a few days on the new medications. The doctor hands him a new set of pill bottles, and his father gives him a brief smile of approval. Their father doesn’t really seem to smile as much as—as much as he used to, Gerard thinks, and suddenly his headache is back in full force. As much as _what_? or as much as _who_?

He thinks: This is where an emotion should be.

He waits, as if expecting to feel something more.

There isn’t anything there.

Just empty space and nothingness.

But things are better. That’s what the doctor said.

He thinks, they probably gave me sedatives. Sedated, he thinks. He pictures the word in his head, tries to focus on each individual letter. S _ _ A T E D. It leaves a funny taste in his mouth.

The doctor steeples his fingers again, watching him. “What are you feeling, Gerard?”

He has to think about it for a moment. “Happy,” he says eventually.

It’s the first word that comes to mind.

He thinks, this is what it feels like to be happy.

It feels exhausting.

The doctor asks him a lot what he’s feeling. He doesn’t understand why; it’s always more or less the same, but the more he gets asked how he feels, the more it makes his head hurt, and then he has to ask for another one of the migraine suppressants so he can think again.

Sometimes he feels like he’s missing something, something crucially important, but he can never remember what it is. However, it still isn’t too much of a concern for him; he isn’t really that worried about anything anymore.

He thinks, there isn’t anything useful about worrying.

 _The present is the focus_.

He thinks, I used to worry about this sort of thing when I was younger. He’s pretty sure that he remembers it being extremely stressful.

The aftermath is secondary, he thinks. The words are printed in black letters on the wall at the doctor’s office.

He tries to focus on each letter individually, one by one by one, but halfway through he forgets if he’s reading kanji or English. The letters swim drunkenly across his eyes.

Even the voice in his own head sounds tired.

He knows Mikey worries a bit more about the whole thing as he gets older, but he still trusts his older brother’s judgement above all else, even the doctors or their father. He’s glad Mikey still believes him; he doesn’t want Mikey to worry about anything. If Gerard says it’s going to be fine, then it’s going to be fine.

There isn’t another option.

On the first day of school after he turns sixteen, one of the girls from Gerard’s class sits next to him at lunch. He doesn’t know what to do or what to say to her, if anything at all, but she doesn’t seem to mind just sitting there in silence while they eat. When the designated hour for lunch is over, they line up and file back into their separate classrooms.

By the end of the day, he’s forgotten about the incident entirely.

She sits next to him again the next day, though, shooting him covert glances as though daring him to tell her to leave. He doesn’t want to tell her to leave, so he doesn’t say anything.

Finally she relaxes enough to eat her lunch without sneaking looks at him every few seconds, which is good because it was making him nervous.

The day after that, he thinks about smiling when she sits down next to him.

He means to smile at her, but somehow the message gets mistranslated on the way from his brain to his mouth, so he doesn’t end up doing anything at all.

After a week of sitting next to him at lunch, she grabs onto his hand when they all get up to form a line.

Gerard looks over at her, surprised but not upset, but she determinedly doesn’t make eye contact. He feels that fluttery feeling of nervousness in his stomach again.

He doesn’t say anything to her.

He doesn’t really mind the hand-holding, so he lets it happen. It isn’t harming anyone, he thinks, so there isn’t a problem.

That night, after they’ve all gone to bed, he keeps his eyes shut and thinks about it.

Normally he tells Mikey everything that happens to him, but for some reason he doesn’t mention this. He thinks he just forgets, and then there isn’t a good time to bring it up. He knows that eventually he’ll probably marry some girl and settle down in their own apartment building and have a couple of kids, because it’s the logical thing to do, but it all seems very far off in the distant future.

He tries to think only about the present, because that’s one of the things that his doctor is always reminding him of—the aftermath is secondary. He doesn’t need to worry about getting married or having a family until it happens.

It’s very clinical and practical, the way the city discusses marriage and family and children. He learned about that in school. He knows that it’s illegal to discriminate against anyone because of their sexuality or anything else, and he knows that one of the women who lives on the twenty-third floor of Building 12, Sector 7 has a wife who lives with her in their shared apartment. He knows that procreation is encouraged to keep population levels constant, but it isn’t as though any other options are penalized. He just hadn’t really thought about anything like that, not in regards to himself.

He thinks he might be focusing too much on other things, so he gets up and goes into the bathroom he and Mikey share. The medications are in the cabinet. He finds the bottle of light blue pills, the ones that are supposed to make him sleep better, and fills his toothbrush cup with water from the sink.

The water helps. He glances in the mirror; his hair is sticking up on one side, spiky and messy. He runs the water over his hands and tries to smooth it down somewhat, but it doesn’t really work.

He walks as quietly as he can back into the bedroom and crawls back under the covers. He can already feel the medications helping. He closes his eyes again and tries not to think. He likes the way the medications make him feel, or don’t feel. The pills make him feel all washed-out and blurry, and he doesn’t think about any of the bad things, and he isn’t too nervous. When he’s not on the higher doses of medication that the doctor prescribed for him, he feels like shit all the time; the pills help him to feel better.

Which is the point. Live _better_.

The city’s view on medication is as practical as everything else. Not everyone’s brains can properly produce the right levels of dopamine etc. to ensure a happy and healthy life, so some adjustment and help is therefore required. It isn’t a bad thing, to take medication to help yourself stay happy and healthy; it’s just how life works.

The pills administered to every citizen are treated like food—you need nutrition to be a functioning human being. No one would shame you for needing to eat food every day, or to drink water.

It’s nothing out of the ordinary, just another part of life.

He gets up in the mornings. He goes to school. He attends his classes. He goes home. He does his homework. He listens to the static noise in his headphones. He goes to bed in the evenings. During lunches he sits next to the girl from his class and lets her hold his hand and doesn’t know what to say to her but somehow the silence is comfortable anyway, like when he and Mikey are lying in their beds on opposite sides of their room, neither of them speaking but both of them breathing together in the dark.

One day, in the line before they separate to go to their next classes, she leans over and kisses him, briefly, on the mouth.

The whole thing is over too quickly for him to really think about how it feels, but later he lies on his bed and touches his mouth with his fingertips and thinks, probably it felt good.

His stomach feels like it’s tied in knots again. It almost feels like when he was nervous all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily feel bad. It feels warm and tingly and definitely weird. He doesn’t know if he likes the idea.

It’s one of those things that people are supposed to do, so it’s relieving to know that it’s something that happens to him too. He hadn’t really thought about liking anyone before, but he supposes that this means he likes her.

It feels like it should be important.

He thinks, maybe this means she’s his girlfriend now. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to ask her, or if it’s just something that happens and nobody talks about. He tries not to dwell on it too much, though, because he knows he isn’t supposed to be worrying about things.

The next day, she leaves him a note that suggests meeting up at the courtyard behind the school building before everyone takes buses to their respective apartment buildings.

He goes. He doesn’t know what else to do.

She’s standing underneath one of the carefully trimmed trees, an oak or a maple or something else not native to California. Neither of them seems to know what to say. The fluttering feeling is back again, making his stomach hurt. It’s almost a relief when she kisses him because then at least then there’s something to do.

It’s kind of messy. There’s too much spit and her lips are kind of just rubbing against his; he doesn’t really see the point. His skin is tingling all over, but he thinks that’s probably just because of how nervous he feels. He keeps worrying that he’ll get his clothes dirty and then he’ll be in trouble because he’s not supposed to play in the mud.

Kissing is one of those things that seems pretty strange in theory but isn’t terrible when it actually happens, he decides. He has to keep pulling away so he can breathe, and the sound of their lips moving across skin is kind of gross, and he almost jumps a mile when she tries to stick her tongue in his mouth. It tastes weird. He doesn’t know if he’s supposed to like it or not.

He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he ends up just settling them in his lap and letting her take the lead. It’s difficult to focus on anything other than the constant loop of _kissing! kissing! kissing!_ that’s running through his head.

It feels like it should be important.

He thinks that means it probably is.

He definitely prefers it when they’re just holding hands, though. He likes looking at her, and he thinks it would probably be weird to do that while she had her mouth on his.

She has nice hands, small and smooth. They’re pretty, with all the joints and knuckles and fingertips. If he were still drawing pictures like he used to when he and Mikey were really little kids, he would probably try to draw them. He hasn’t really felt like picking up a pencil in a while, though. Homework is exhausting enough as it is; he doesn’t have the extra energy to do anything else.

Eventually they stop kissing and she wipes her mouth on her sleeve and says, “I should probably go home, I don’t want to be late for dinner.”

Gerard says, “Yeah.”

His voice sounds kind of weird.

He thinks, this is what your voice sounds like after you kiss someone! and he figures that it’s the kind of milestone to be excited about.

His mouth is a little sore.

It feels like it’s a big deal, like nothing will ever be the same again now that this terrible magical incident has happened.

Sometimes the guys in his class whisper during lunch about girls, about what girls they’ve kissed or done other things with, and how it makes them feel like they’re getting closer to being adults.

He doesn’t really feel like he’s suddenly grown-up, or like he knows something special that he didn’t know before. It kind of just feels like they kissed a couple times in the school courtyard, then had to leave, which is what happened. They walk together to the edge of the courtyard without holding hands this time, then she smiles at him one more time and heads off towards the other side of the Hub catch the bus that will take her back to her house. Gerard makes his way in a daze over to the transit key where he can catch his own bus. It isn’t until he’s almost home that he realizes that he never picked up Mikey from his classroom like he’s done every other day since school started all those years ago.

***

Mikey is worried about his brother. Gerard has been spending a lot of his free time lying in their shared room, sleeping or just listening to white noise on his headphones, or getting out his homework like he’s going to start working on it but then doing something else instead because he gets tired. Mikey is worried enough that he mentions this to Ray, who’s become his alternate confidant now that Gerard has other responsibilities like school and homework and other growing-up things that are apparently far more interesting than hanging out with your younger brother.

They’re at Ray’s house when Mikey mentions it, sitting on the floor of his room doing nothing in particular.

It’s easy to hang out with Ray. He doesn’t ask much of Mikey, content just to be in the same room at the same time, to talk or not to talk. Sometimes they do their homework together, even though they’re not supposed to help each other. Ray listens to his headphones almost as much as Gerard does, but it’s different somehow.

Ray always seems _awake_.

“He’s probably just busy,” Ray says, shrugging. Not much bothers Ray. He’s like the anti-Mikey, concerned by nothing, anxious about nothing. Sometimes he annoys Mikey with his perpetual lightheartedness, in times when Mikey feels like he could almost fall out of his body and lose focus on anything tangible. “He’s in a higher grade than us, remember, so they probably have a lot more homework than we do. You’re just mad he keeps forgetting to tell you if he’s hanging out with his other friends and can’t take the bus home like you two always do, dumbo.”

“Yeah,” says Mikey doubtfully. “I guess.”

He doesn’t really think Gerard has any other friends.

Ray’s expression changes, and he takes off his headphones carefully. He’s usually always careful with his electronics, headphones and computer and everything else. He’s a tech nerd just like Mikey is, but his parents actually let him mess with his devices. “Or,” he says, looking shrewd and thoughtful, then hesitates. “Or. I heard from somebody at school that they saw your brother holding hands with this one girl from his grade during lunch. Maybe he has a girlfriend.”

Lunch is divided by class, so Mikey almost never gets to see Gerard unless there’s a school-wide event, and even then there’s usually assigned seating (by grade level). He usually always sits with Ray, except when there’s preferential placement (by individual GPA) if someone from Better Living Industries is supposed to be giving a presentation to the school that day, like one of the Exterminators or someone important like that.

Mikey says, “He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

“How d’you know?”

“He would tell me,” Mikey starts, then stops. He doesn’t know if that’s true anymore. He hasn’t really talked to Gerard in—a while.

Ray shrugs, nonchalant. “Whatever,” he says. “I’m just saying. Maybe he’s in _love_.”

“Ew,” says Mikey. “No.”

“I don’t really think about it, that much,” says Ray, looking conflicted. “Girls, I mean. I guess we have a couple years before we have to think about it at all, cause it’s not like you have to get married as soon as you turn eighteen or anything. I don’t know, though. Do you think about girls a lot?”

“I,” says Mikey, “not really.”

He doesn’t mean to be dismissive, but it probably comes out that way. He thinks a lot about his homework, and what he has to do to get the grades he needs so his father will be satisfied with his academic ability. He thinks a lot about how he misses when Gerard wasn’t so moody and reclusive all the time, when they would actually talk, instead of just existing in the same space. He doesn’t think a lot about much else.

There isn’t really anything terribly interesting to think _about_.

“Do you think about guys? I mean, it’s okay if you do, I don’t care or anything like that, I’m not a jerk.”

“Um. I don’t think so.” He doesn’t really think about anybody, not like that.

He doesn’t think Gerard does, either, whether it’s guys or girls or both. Gerard doesn’t seem like he thinks about _anything_ these days.

“Okay, okay, fine,” says Ray, surrendering. He holds out his headphones, an olive branch of mollification. “Hey, hang on a minute, I’ll show you something cool. Listen to this—here, c’mon.”

Mikey thinks about refusing, but he takes the headphones grudgingly, expecting the usual white noise or muted static. Instead, he hears someone screaming over a sudden burst of discordant noise, and he startles and pulls the headphones away from his ears jerkily, shocked and confused. “What the hell, what _is_ that?”

“Real music,” says Ray proudly. “Ramones. They’re a band from I think the eighties. Um. The 1980s. Here, I’ll put on another one for you if you don’t like that song. I can turn up the volume so we can listen together.” He takes the headphones back without letting their hands touch, and fiddles with them even while he’s looking right at Mikey, chewing nervously on his lower lip.

Mikey thinks, he wants my approval.

He looks over at Ray and nods, once, briefly.

He means to nod again or smile or something, but he can’t focus on anything else that isn’t the music still coming through the headphone speakers. It’s muffled, but it’s somehow the most interesting thing in the entire world.

They sit there on the floor and listen together to illegal music.

Mikey learns several things. The first thing he learns is that Ray has a bunch of bootlegged audio saved on a flash drive, which he lets Mikey listen to. He already knows that music, real music, isn’t something that the city _does_ —white noise exists for the headphones, and rain or wind sounds exist for ASMR-like purposes, along with some typically historic classical music. But nothing at all like what Ray has, emanating from the tinny speakers of his headphones.

“What instrument is that?” whispers Mikey. He likes how heavy and bold it sounds. He thinks, _unafraid_. He feels more awake than he has in a long time.

“Um,” says Ray, and fidgets with the headphone cord. “It’s. More than one? Guitar, I think. Maybe drums. I don’t really know. Sorry.”

“Okay,” says Mikey, and decides to act like he knows what that means. He’s seen pictures in history books, but he doesn’t know much about musical instruments themselves. It’s not something he’s really thought about before. He wants to know how the instruments make those noises, but he doesn’t know how to ask something like that. He wants to know how it works, but he doesn’t know how to find the right words.

Neither of them says anything about the fact that they are breaking the law.

Mikey knows they could both be sent to a rehabilitation program for _years_ if anyone caught them, but he doesn’t want to stop listening to the music. He wonders if Ray’s parents know that their son listens to bootleg audio in his bedroom with his friends. He wonders if Ray shows his music to anyone else. He wonders if Gerard knows, if Gerard ever listens to music like this. He wants to know and he doesn’t want to know, at the same time. He also kind of wants to yell at Gerard, suddenly. He wants to cry, but there aren’t any tears, just the feeling of crying, with his eyes burning.

The song finishes, and Ray hesitates, fiddling with the headphone cord again. He says, “Do you. We could listen to more, if you want.”

“Yeah,” says Mikey. His heart is beating very rapidly, and he feels like he’s going to scream or explode or die if he has to listen to one more second of the music. He wants it to stop. He wants to hear more. He doesn’t know what he wants. “Yeah,” he hears himself say, “we could do that.”

Ray tries to point out the girl that Gerard has supposedly been holding hands with the next day at school, but she isn’t in any of the classes she’s supposed to be in, and no one knows where she is. Mikey thinks she was probably made up in the first place, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He keeps looking at Ray and thinking about the music hiding in a flash drive under his bed.

“Maybe they broke up,” says Ray unhelpfully. There are pills to get over breakups, and of course there are always m-mods. Heartbreak can be remedied and eliminated by erasing the problem.

Mikey scrunches up his nose. “If they did, G doesn’t seem to care,” he says. Gerard hasn’t changed at all during the entire episode.

Ray just shrugs, like he couldn’t care less. “I don’t know, man, girls are weird.”

“Yeah,” says Mikey. He can agree with that much, at least.

Mikey’s fifteenth birthday passes quietly. He eats rehydrated cupcakes with his father and brother, the three of them sitting together at the table in the kitchen in companionable silence. He doesn’t mind that nobody really says that much, because he doesn’t really feel like saying anything either.

It’s nice just to be there in that room, existing with his family.

Gerard goes to bed early, complaining of another headache, and Mikey drifts around aimlessly like a staticky ghost until Ray knocks on their door and invites him to come over to hang out, “for secret reasons, and also because it’s your birthday!”

Mikey rolls his eyes. “Dude,” he says. “That isn’t a secret, everyone knows that it’s my birthday.” Ray can’t keep a surprise a _surprise_ for that long before he has to go tell it to everyone.

Sometimes Mikey thinks that if Ray actually had to keep something hidden for real, he would explode.

But then again, he hasn’t told anyone about the music.

So maybe it’s just some things.

His father gives him permission when he asks to go over to Ray’s apartment, provided that he comes back before curfew. Curfew is hours away; he isn’t too worried about that.

Ray gives him a hug first in the doorway of Mikey’s apartment and then another one when they get to Ray’s, and they go sit on the floor of Ray’s room again, where Ray gives him his birthday gift. He’s wrapped it in plain white tissue paper and tape, and Mikey forgets about being careful and just rips the packaging off, tearing the paper in the process.

The present is a movie.

It’s some old Disney disc set or other, the serial number and barcode scraped off the back, and the plastic cover peeling and dirty. The kind of thing you could find in the clearance section at the thrift store before the Helium Wars. Mikey wasn’t alive then, but he’s heard about what it was like.

Ray is looking expectantly at him.

Mikey thinks, I should probably say something.

The only thing on the television most of the time is Fact News or Mousekat cartoons, which Gerard says he’s too old to watch, because Gerard is seventeen and a brat. Mikey still secretly likes the Mousekat cartoons, even if Gerard makes fun of him for it. He only watches the television when Gerard is somewhere else, though, because Gerard always says it hurts his head when he watches it for too long. He mostly just listens to his headphones a lot and lies in bed. He used to draw, but he doesn’t anymore; he only takes his pills and sleeps and listens to white noise.

Mikey still worries, sometimes. Gerard has the opposite problem of Mikey’s—while Mikey sometimes feels like he’s only attached to his body by the thinnest of wires, Gerard moves like gravity has increased to the point of pain. Mikey doesn’t feel entirely there; Gerard is never anywhere else.

But Gerard seems to be happy, or at least not sad, so he doesn’t want to complain too openly for fear that everything so delicate will shatter irreplaceably.

Mikey forces himself to snap back to the present. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment to ground himself. Ray gave him a movie.

He thinks, a _movie_! and he kind of wants to scream or maybe just cry.

He doesn’t know how to thank Ray, so he just hugs him instead of trying to find the right words. Thankfully Ray seems to understand what he can’t figure out how to explain, which is good because normally only Gerard can do that, and hugs him back.

“Okay,” says Ray eventually, and reaches for his computer. “You wanna actually watch this thing?”

The visuals are terrible, and the audio quality absolutely sucks, but it’s in color instead of black-and-white like Mousekat, and the little animated people sing for part of the time, instead of just speaking. Ray scuffs his feet against the floor and says it’s nothing, just a cartoon, but it’s still ridiculously enthralling for a first glimpse into a new world of new things to explore.

Mikey starts to get up once the final scene has ended, but Ray puts a hand on his arm, holding him back. “Credits, dude! We gotta listen to the instrumentals!” When Mikey just stares at him, Ray sighs and pauses the movie. “Stuff like Mousekat doesn’t have credits or whatever, but real movies do, it’s awesome. They always play music and everything. I’m not supposed to tell you or anything, but my parents have a bunch of movies and they let me watch all sorts of stuff all the time. It’s super cool.”

“Oh,” Mikey says. He settles back down, and Ray unpauses the movie.

Finally the credits are over, and Mikey can’t sit still for a single second longer. He jumps on the bed and hugs Ray tightly and holds on, clinging to his shoulders and locking his knees around Ray’s chest like a bur until Ray complains that his ribs are going to break in half, and he shoves Mikey off him onto the bed and tries to smother him with the pillow.

“Again,” he demands, kicking the pillow away with more force than he’d meant to use, so that it flies across the room and lands on Ray’s dresser.

“You wanna watch it _again_?” Ray raises his eyebrows, but Mikey doesn’t budge. “Jeez, okay. Lemme go to the bathroom first though. And hey, you want any snacks?”

They watch the movie three whole times on the day of Mikey’s birthday, sitting on the floor of Ray’s room. They use Ray’s computer each time, because computer activity is tracked, and Mikey hasn’t learned how to disable his tracker like Ray has. Ray’s parents are computer scientists who work for Better Living Industries, so he knows how to do all sorts of cool things like that.

Mikey keeps meaning to ask Ray to show him how.

The movie is objectively bad (especially the quality and the audio), but it’s the first real one Mikey has ever seen. The animations are in color and there’s singing, which he wasn’t expecting.

He wants to take out the disc and extract the film from it like he’s seen in history textbooks, so he can look at the pictures individually.

He knows it’s impossible.

It’s just—

He’s completely in love with every part of the movie. He wants to write down the lyrics to all the songs so he can sing along the next time he hears them. He wants to copy the disc onto a flash drive so he can carry it with him at all times. He wants _more_.

Mikey doesn’t think about the future much, but when he does, he thinks he could want to have a job like Ray’s parents. He likes taking things apart and figuring out how they work. He doesn’t think that sort of job would involve the illegal music that he loves so much, but maybe it would be the closest thing to it.

The music, he thinks. He still doesn’t quite know how it works.

Ray is over on the other side of the room, retrieving the flung pillow; Mikey scrambles to his feet. “Ray, Ray,” he says urgently, swatting Ray’s arm, reminded of something he’s been meaning to ask for a while. “Ray.”

“Ow,” says Ray. He pulls his arm away. “What.”

Mikey grabs onto his other arm and hangs on like a he’s a monkey. “Ray—I gotta ask you something—”

“ _What_?”

“Could you get me some music too? You said you could, before.” Ray had explained that his parents had a friend who had _connections_ and could therefore find music that way. He said the word _connections_ with emphasis, like it was a big important word, and Mikey didn’t know what that implied but acted like he did anyway. “I can pay you,” he adds, in case Ray is worried about not having the carbons or something.

“Isn’t one birthday present enough? _Wow_ ,” says Ray, hitting Mikey with the pillow again and again until Mikey yelps and surrenders. “You’re greedy.”

“No,” Mikey complains. He reaches for Ray’s arm again; it helps, to be touching something solid. He feels a little bit less like he’s going to pop out of existence. “Dude. Shut up.”

“Jeez, I was _joking_ ,” Ray says, and it takes a bit of wheedling, but finally Ray agrees to act as the go-between.

Mikey doesn’t know enough about music to know what he likes right away, but he figures out eventually that he likes most of the songs with the heavy—guitars? he thinks. He still isn’t sure what instrument makes what sound. He wants to get his hands on some real instruments and take them apart.

He spends hours just listening to the music.

He tries to imagine the sort of person who would make music like this, but he can’t even begin to picture what they would look like.

He tries to memorize all the words, and occasionally sings along a little, and sometimes he even pretends he’s playing an instrument.

He doesn’t exactly know quite which instrument does what, though, so he invents a made-up instrument of his own that can do anything and everything he wants it to do. It reminds him of when he and Gerard were kids, when they would make up imaginary worlds far beyond the walls of Battery City, where they could fight monsters together and save people from evil villains and do anything they wanted because they were heroes and that was how things worked.

The bad guys die and the good guys win.

***

Gerard turns eighteen eventually, which means he needs a job. He doesn’t know what to look for, but apparently there are benefits of your father having worked in the SCARECROW division for over twenty years, because he finds himself landing a job working at an entry-level position as a computer analyst in BL-HQ barely a week after his birthday. “It’s a good opportunity,” his father explains over breakfast. The admission papers are spread out on the table in between them. “You’d start out with a training period, then graduate to a formal position. You should take the offer.”

“Yeah,” Gerard says. He glances down at the papers. They say all sorts of things about responsibility and work ethic and potential, always potential. The potential to be _better_. “I guess.”

Mikey wanders into the kitchen then, yawning. His hair is a mess and his glasses are crooked; he probably stayed up late again messaging Ray or one of his other friends on his FlatScreen. He reaches for a mug and fills it up with purified water from the sink, then drops in two of the flavored electrolyte tablets. The fizz of the tablets dissolving is audible even to Gerard.

“Good morning, Michael,” their father says. “We were just discussing your brother’s new position as a computer data analyst for Better Living Industries.”

“Oh,” says Mikey. “Cool.” He takes his mug and goes to sit on the couch in the living room; a moment later, the muted sound of the TV can be heard.

Their father sighs. “I worry about him, sometimes,” he says, looking over at Gerard. “Your brother is extremely intelligent, but he has a tendency to avoid authority and to get himself into trouble. It’s good that he has friends to keep him on the right track.”

“I guess so,” says Gerard. That doesn’t sound like the Mikey he knows. He thinks, Mikey would probably be better at the job. He’s decent with data analysis, but not brilliant at it like Mikey is. It’s a good thing that he isn’t so nervous all the time anymore, or he would probably be stressed about the whole thing, and he hasn’t even started the job yet.

“This would be a good opportunity,” his father repeats. Every job is a job with Better Living Industries, indirectly, but Gerard isn’t _too_ out of it not to recognize how big of a deal it is that he’s been given a position in the main department.

It might not be the same as training to be an Exterminator, but it’s better than being a janitor mopping up after the higher-ups in the department.

He thinks, when I was a kid I wanted to be an Exterminator.

Dreams can come true. He thinks he probably read that particular phrase somewhere on some billboard or other. Sometimes he thinks of something that at first seems like an original idea, then it turns out to be another slogan for Better Living Industries. Sometimes, if he stays up too late before taking the sleeping medications, he imagines that Better Living can tap directly into his brain and pluck out every single thing he comes up with throughout the course of the day.

He has another nightmare that night and wakes up terrified, with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.

He thinks half-heartedly about awakening Mikey. When he was a lot younger, and he would have nightmares, he would always crawl over to Mikey’s bed and wake him up so he could talk about it. It always helped, to have Mikey curled up next to him, listening. Sometimes when Mikey would have nightmares, he would crawl into Gerard’s bed and wake _him_ up, and they wouldn’t need to say anything at all. They would just lie there and breathe together and go back to sleep.

But he isn’t a kid anymore, and he isn’t supposed to be feel nervous, and he isn’t supposed to have nightmares. He knows he used to have lucid nightmares when he was just a kid, but now he doesn’t remember any of them. He wakes up frightened, breathing quickly, sheets sticking to his sweaty skin.

It’s almost worse, not to remember. He doesn’t know what’s scaring him.

He can’t wake up Mikey. He exhales, rolls over, and looks up at the ceiling.

It’s still there, he thinks. Still there.

A package arrives the day after he sends in the completed forms; inside he finds a white uniform with the Better Living Industries logo printed in black over the pocket of the shirt. He puts the uniform on. It fits perfectly.

There’s also a letter, congratulating him. The letter informs him that he’s supposed to meet his fellow new employees and their supervisors in Room 267 on the fifth floor of the Better Living Industries main building the next day.

He eats breakfast with his father at the kitchen table that morning. His hands are steady when he spoons cereal into his mouth.

Mikey comes into the room, yawning. He doesn’t have to go to school until nearly an hour later than Gerard has to be at work, because starting school too early isn’t healthy. “G, did you finish the re-hy milk?”

Gerard shakes his head. He thinks there should still be some in the cabinet. Mikey eventually locates the box and tears open one of the packets. He pours the powder into a bowl and turns on the sink to fill the bowl with water.

They eat more or less in silence. Gerard rinses his dishes and places them in the dishwasher, then gathers the paperwork he’s supposed to bring and pulls on his shoes. He’s still wearing the uniform; he doesn’t remember putting it on.

“Wait,” Mikey blurts out suddenly; Gerard stops. Mikey looks as surprised as he himself feels. “Just—good luck.”

“Oh.”

“Since it’s your first day or whatever.” Mikey looks down at his half-eaten bowl of cereal, fidgeting. “I dunno. Yeah.”

Gerard nods. He doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to say. “Okay,” he says. He makes sure to close the door carefully behind him when he leaves.

The job is supposed to start with basic training. He takes the elevator up to the fifth floor, clutching the papers to his chest.

The elevator dings when it reaches the second floor. The doors slide open, waiting, and someone else gets in. The newcomer glances over at Gerard and smiles politely. She’s wearing a badge on a lanyard around her neck, the official form—Gerard squints at it, trying not to seem like he’s prying. It’s the official form of identification for SCARECROW.

It’s been years; he almost doesn’t remember. He thinks about when he was younger, when he thought being an Exterminator was the coolest job in the world.

He glances at the badge again. It says SPRAWL. He notices then that she’s armed; there’s a white raygun holstered against her hip. Her hair is bright but natural orange.

Neither of them speaks. Exterminator Sprawl exits the elevator on the fourth floor without looking back.

He finally arrives at the correct room in the correct building on the correct floor. His hands aren’t shaking, but the paperwork he’s holding is slightly wrinkled from the press of his fingertips. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next. He walks towards the faint sound of voices.

A group of Exterminators is standing clustered in the hallway, clearly in the middle of a conversation. Two of them are carrying their trademark SCARECROW masks; the third is dressed in a crisp white suit with tailored suits.

The masks are white with the simple black outlines of smiling faces printed on them. Gerard’s heart flips over.

Exterminator Korse must be in his mid-twenties by now; he’s evidently risen to a much higher position within the company. Gerard keeps his head down as he slips past the Exterminators to enter the proper room.

Korse doesn’t say anything to signify that he recognizes him.

He thinks, he probably doesn’t remember me.

He wonders what happened to Exterminator Jameson.

Exterminator Korse is holding a position as a senior member of the SCARECROW team, one of the Director’s closest employees, in charge of a legion of draculoids and Exterminator underlings. He has the clearance to go into the desert on top-secret missions, and he has regular private meetings with the Director herself.

The first thing Gerard learns from his coworkers about Korse is that everyone who isn’t him is envious of him. A girl who he thinks he recognizes from his class at school tells him that people call Korse _the Scarecrow_ sometimes, not SCARECROW but the Scarecrow, but she doesn’t know why. Gerard has never seen a scarecrow in real life before, but he knows what they’re supposed to look like—straw stuffed inside old clothes, arms spread in warning, immobile in a field of growing things.

Everything is a blur at first. He signs what seems like hundreds of confidentiality agreements, which provide the excuse he uses when he gets home after the first day and Mikey is waiting for him in the main room on the couch and wants to know every single detail of what he’s been working on.

“Can’t tell you—important confidential stuff,” he mumbles evasively, which is technically true, so he doesn’t worry too much about feeling like he’s lying to his brother.

He kind of can’t remember what’s happened during the day, even though he knows it was probably important. It’s all just a blur of static and nothingness, and he gets a headache if he thinks about it too much, and then he has to take another pill to make the growing migraine stop, and then he gets all sleepy and goes and lies in his bed and listens to his headphones and doesn’t think about anything, anything at all.

He thinks maybe he isn’t supposed to be forgetting everything. It makes him nervous when he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing, and then he can’t sit still. Now that he has an office job, it’s even more important to be able to focus, because he’s going to be helping people. He thinks maybe the medications are wearing off, and that’s why he feels so restless and itchy all the time, like his skin is shrinking in the wash.

He mentions this to the doctor on his weekly visit—a formality required for all official employees. The doctor frowns and takes him into a room full of television screens; most of them are showing nothing but gray-and-white dots of static, SMPTE color bars flickering sideways, bright streaks of warped images, distorted to the point of unreality. It looks ugly and unnerving.

There are chairs in front of some of the screens, with people in them. The doctor directs him to one of them, and he sits in it.

“Look at the screen, Gerard,” the doctor says. His skull itches. He thinks he should remember this.

He looks at the screen.

Everything bursts into his head at once, an endless screaming stream of meaningless information, INFORMATION, processed and sliced up and delivered machine-packaged to the frontal cortex, flicking the switch on the control panel of the brain.

He thinks: Floor 4, Room 53, CLASS; Floor 1, Room 97 MIKEY; Building 6, Sector 5 SCHOOL; 438, Building 12, Sector 7, APARTMENT; Building B7, Sector 5 DOCTOR; Area 62, Sector 7 PARK; Building 308, Sector 10 LIBRARY; Battery Towers, Building A, Sector 12—

He can’t remember the name of the woman supervising him. Stacy or Shiki or Sandra or something like that. He registers vaguely that he doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to be doing, but when he touches the computer keyboard with his fingertips, his hands move automatically. His hands remember all the training from the first day, even if he brain doesn’t, and he dutifully sorts through old files and data collections like he’s been doing it his whole life.

“Gerard, can you file these for me? Modification in Section D-17, Article 09, upgraded from physical papers to digital.”

He takes the folder obediently. “Okay,” he says, flipping it open. The sheet of paper on top is a columned list of population statistics.

He doesn’t talk much with the other people in his group of new employees. He thinks they were probably all introduced at one point, but he can’t really remember. It can’t be that important, then, if he can’t remember it. He knows how to do the important things. He knows how to do his job. That’s what matters the most.

Korse doesn’t end up training the new group of computer analysts—he’s much too senior of an employee to be even considered for _that_ position—but he drops by from time to time to check on progress, and it’s always horribly uncomfortable.

There would be some tension between Gerard and Korse if the medications weren’t in the equation—but they are, so Gerard doesn’t realize there’s anything there that’s out of the ordinary. Korse does figure it out (his own job literally entails observation of nuance), but he doesn’t do anything about it.

Yet.

The job pays well enough, not that salary matters.

Food is given to everyone regardless of their job or social status or amount of carbons to their name, because citizens of the inner Sectors need to eat to survive. Water, electricity, and television are all considered inherent rights granted to every law-abiding citizen. Everyone gets a set of headphones, a closet full of clothes, and an excellent public education. It’s just how things work—the opposite of the terrorist-occupied areas in the desert, for example, where you have to fight constantly to get essentials. It sounds horrible and miserable and completely not worth it.

But Gerard is happy. The doctor asks him each time he goes to pick up more pills what he’s feeling, and he always says he’s happy. If he keeps saying it, then it must be true.

He sees the doctor regularly for more of the sleeping pills, and that’s good.

He works steadily at his job, tracking and recording data, parsing through surveillance footage, connecting files and research. Some lucid part of him recognizes that he hasn’t been spending as much time with Mikey recently, but he’s an adult now while Mikey is still in school, so things have to be different anyway. That’s just what it means to grow up. You grow apart.


	2. Chapter 2

INFORMATION BOOKLET [RETINAL RESORTS] - **REDACTED FOR REVISION**.

_The question on everyone’s lips these days is WHY TRY? and, here at Better Living Industries, we believe that this question is long overdue. Blue skies are a thing of the past, but don’t get discouraged—the muted gray of the protective heliodome is specifically designed for optimal ophthalmic comfort._

_With the grand opening of one of our newest Retinal Resorts—"Where everybody is famous!”—we believe that there are no problems that can’t be solved by plugging in. At our Retinal Resorts, citizens can scroll through endless virtual scenarios of ocular enhancement at their own personal leisure._

_[...]_

_[...] the nucleus accumbens, previous [...] known as 'wireheads.' It is crucial that this information is enough to mislead citizens of our shining future city to believe that those removed from quality living will be relocated to a Resort. The reality of [...] , unknown aftermath._

INFORMATION BOOKLET [KEEP SMILING] - **FINAL PROOF**.

_“Keep Smiling!” is more than a meaningless slogan concocted by some dead-eyed employee crunching numbers in a nine-to-five cubicle. Here in Battery City, our cubicles are designed for efficiency and practicality, and all of our promises are grounded in facts._

_Better Living Industries essays to utilize only taglines or slogans which call to mind elements of scientific progress. It might seem easy to dismiss the concept that simply smiling every day will cure anything, but when you examine the practicalities behind the idea, you discover that even moving the muscles in your face and jaw to form a smile will induce a release of dopamine, which leads to increased happiness. This is why we at Better Living Industries ask_ Have You Smiled Today?

 _You might be thinking,_ O.K., BLI, but isn’t that manipulative? _to which we say_ YES! _Manipulation is not necessarily malignant, despite what some of us might want to believe. If you can convince your brain into believing that it’s happy, then you’re already halfway on the journey to accomplishing it. Much like hypnosis or cognitive therapy readjustments—known as “cleansings” within our upper-level medical teams—reminding yourself to smile can guide you further on the path to happiness._

_If genuine happiness is too difficult, don’t worry! Synthetic emotions are the next logical step in the movement towards elimination of mental flaws. Artificial happiness provides the same dopamine release as the original emotions are intended to provide, without the irritating handicap of occasionally losing control. As long as you’re taking regular doses of the proper medications, all problems with controlling or regulating emotions can be wiped away._

_Progress might work in strange ways, but it still works. It can be a slow and painful process, but we encourage all citizens of Battery City to focus only on the sensations of the present. After all, the aftermath is secondary._

INFORMATION BOOKLET [2021].

_There was a time when our splendid home, Battery City, used to be known by a different name and a different architectural background. The efficiency renovation projects of 2015 changed the topography of the city itself, replacing many of the wider boulevards and eccentrically grand hotels with sky-scraping concrete office buildings for maximum productivity and neat, tidy apartments for our citizens. The urban planning specialists designed the layout of our city to be more easily protected, as well as more effective, shifted into a mathematically stable gridwork of straight lines and sharp corners._

_Much of the renovation was designed specifically to prevent another disaster on the scale of the 2012 wildfires, which destroyed most of the native vegetation and irreparably damaged great quantities of the natural landscape. By utilizing concrete, metal, and glass as the three primary building blocks, Better Living Industries was able to fireproof and weatherproof Battery City. The addition of the synthetic heliodome to control temperature and weather eliminated the problem of airborne toxins such as disease, pollution, or the radioactive fallout from the Helium Wars (2006-2017)._

_This is not to say that all green life was entirely wiped out—Better Living Industries has made a point to restore trees throughout Battery City in parks and leisure areas. Because of the higher quantities of hydrogen in the air, most crops produced within the city are grown in greenhouses, which maintain carefully controlled concentrations of CO2 and O2 for optimal growing environments. While a forest may seem as foreign a concept as the unpleasant thought of garishly bright colors, Better Living Industries invites all citizens to visit the greenhouses to enjoy a pleasant stroll through our modified farming systems, which are currently open to the public._

_Superfluous growth is nonexistent. Why bother with ephemeral pretty things when you can focus on something permanent? Nobody needs living flowers. Much like weeds, decorative plants are useless luxury, and useless things are discarded._

_Besides, if any citizens desire a taste of the real thing, Better Living Industries is proud to announce the reopening of the refurbished electric backdrops installed on city limits, which are capable of showing the viewer a myriad of options from which to choose in terms of virtual vacation—from the snow-covered hills of countries that no longer exist to the lush greenery of impossible forests. Simply sit back and allow Better Living Industries to provide everything that could possibly be needed._

***

Mikey spends most of his free time at Ray’s, listening to Ray’s collection of illegal music and falling even deeper in love with how it all sounds. He’s also got a bit of a crush on Ray, mostly because of the music and the movies and the computers, and the fact that he’s sixteen (and a couple of months! he reminds everyone whenever he can) and any kind of rebellion seems terribly attractive. Besides, Gerard doesn’t really want to talk much anymore like they always used to, so when Mikey has a question about something _big_ or _adult_ , he defaults to Ray. Ray is only a little less than a year older than he is, but that makes all the difference—it might not be much, but he still seems very grown-up to Mikey.

They’re lying together on the floor of Ray’s room, listening to The Stooges because they’re one of Ray’s favorites, when Ray brings it up.

“Are things still okay with you guys at home—you know, with your dad and your brother and all? I mean, you know what I mean, now that your brother graduated and got his job and whatever.”

“Yeah,” says Mikey, guarded. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

Ray doesn’t answer for a long moment while The Stooges sing about a pretty face and a dirty look and the way it feels to be running low on memories.

“It’s just that you hang out here all the time, and I never see your brother anymore. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t wanna, but I guess I just miss hanging out with both of you guys. _You_ know,” he snorts, “before your brother got turned into one of those brainwashed Ritalin rats.”

“Don’t talk about Gerard like that,” Mikey mumbles, feeling his face heat up. He hates hearing people call Gerard that, he hates the word, ugly and heavy. He feels sick; he wants, suddenly and furtively, to be anywhere but where he is. “Shut up. He’s not—not a—a—shut _up_.”

Mikey hates when people talk shit about his brother, even when he knows it’s true; while Gerard is taking more and more pills and sleepwalking through each day, Mikey sometimes even forgets to take his at all when he knows he should because he’s with Ray listening to music or looking at movies or reading the few crumbled and faded comic books that Ray’s somehow managed to acquire from the Battery City Library even though they’re not allowed to take books home.

He knows that Ray stole them and hid them underneath his mattress.

He knows that Ray could get in a lot of trouble for that, if anyone found out.

“Look, Mikey,” Ray is saying when Mikey finally manages to pull his brain back into his body, “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I called your brother a—you know. I didn’t mean it. We can just listen to music, we don’t have to talk, okay?”

Mikey shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”

He lies back and listens to the music, _I need a lover with an alibi_ , and tries not to think about Gerard.

He doesn’t like when Ray talks like that, even though he knows deep down that Gerard _is_ messed up. Talking about it just makes it hurt even more. Gerard is supposed to be the tough one, the one who doesn’t worry about anything, who always knows exactly what to do. The one who always has a story for every situation, who can do anything he set his mind to, who makes even the most boring situation into an adventure. Mikey hates how much he misses how things used to be.

He hates the term _Ritalin rat_.

It’s an ugly thing to say, the sort of thing that Ray’s parents would scold him for saying.

“I mean it, I’m really sorry,” Ray repeats, his eyes big and sincere and pleading. Mikey can’t stay mad at him.

“I know,” he says, and sighs. “I hang out with you all the time because you’re my best friend, you idiot.”

Ray beams at him with that familiar huge grin. “Okay,” he says. “Cool. I mean, you’re my best friend too.”

“You don’t _have_ any other friends, stupid.”

“Neither do _you_ , dummy.”

Mikey shoves him, and Ray flops over on top of his legs like gravity has suddenly increased for him and him alone, and the argument speedily dissolves into a pillow fight that continues until Ray’s mother calls out from the other room, _please try to tone it down, boys!_ and they collapse into hysterical giggles on the floor.

The music is still playing in the background.

That makes him feel better for a while. But the more that he thinks about Gerard and the whole mess that is the drugs, the more that he worries.

He doesn’t know what to do.

But he has enough to get by for now. He still has the music and he still has Ray.

And then he doesn’t.

Mikey shows up to school one day a few weeks later, expecting to see Ray waiting for him at the door to the classroom like he does every single day because Mikey is always late and Ray is always early, but there’s nobody there. He lingers in the hallway until he absolutely has to go sit down at his desk or he’ll be marked as absent, but Ray doesn’t show up that day. He doesn’t show up the next day either, or the next, or the next. He isn’t in class the whole week, and nobody explains or even mentions him.

It’s like he’s abruptly ceased to exist.

Ray can’t be sick because nobody gets sick enough to miss school for that long; and besides, if he were sick, he would have already whined about it to Mikey until Mikey would have complained that his ears were going to fall off.

He texts Ray on his FlatScreen a couple of times, without any real expectation of a reply, but the messages bounce back each time.

 _The location you are trying to contact is currently unavailable for messaging. Try again?_ like it’s mocking him, taunting him.

Mikey thinks, Gerard used to walk me to my classes every day, and then suddenly he feels like crying.

No one says anything about it, of course, because no one ever does.

Mikey is reminded of when Gerard briefly, allegedly, had a girlfriend who had vanished and was apparently never seen again. He feels horribly stupid just comparing the two, but that’s really the only frame of reference he has. The difference is that no one except possibly Gerard knows if the girl ever existed, and Mikey knows that Ray existed. Ray was a constant bright presence. Everything feels empty without him.

He tries to subtly talk to some of the other people in his classes at school, but no one really seems to know or care that anything’s happened.

He eventually finds one guy who says that he thinks that maybe Ray got in trouble and had to switch schools because he broke a rule or something, but that’s as far as he gets.

The problem is that sort of thing doesn’t _happen_.

Not to Ray.

Not to anyone.

Ray’s parents are still living in the same house, because he can see them when they get home from work, but nobody answers when he goes over and knocks on the door.

He sends a few more halfhearted messages to Ray on the FlatScreen every so often, but never receives anything in return except the error message.

He considers asking Gerard if he knows something, since Gerard is an adult now and could have heard something at work or wherever else he goes when he isn’t at work or at home, but he doesn’t want to ask Gerard if he knows anything about what happened to Ray and have Gerard reply, _who_?

He’s frustrated and he’s confused and he doesn’t know what to do.

He spends even more time listening to music in his headphones, daring the world to penalize him for breaking the law. Sometimes he listens to the illegal music he got from Ray at the same time that Gerard listens to his soothing white noise, and it almost feels like when they were little kids playing together.

Gerard used to take their pastel, lifeless toys and make up dramatic and sprawling stories, when they were much younger, when Mikey still thought his older brother was a superhero who could do anything. He remembers that Gerard would take the plastic Mousekat figurines and turn them monsters just with his words, and he would turn his hands into evil many-legged demons that secretly just wanted to have fun with their friends, and sometimes he would take two fingers and make them “walk” and “dance” all along Mikey’s arm, until it tickled and Mikey giggled uncontrollably and shoved him away. Mikey misses feeling like that, like it was the two of them against the world.

***

The doctor touches Gerard’s closed eyelids with his fingertips. He’s wearing latex gloves; the texture leaves an odd sensation when it brushes against skin. The doctor asks, “How do you feel?”

Gerard has to clear his throat before he speaks. He says, “I don’t know.”

His eyes are still shut, but he can feel the doctor’s smile.

Routine therapy is a required part of the package that goes along with being employed by Better Living Industries—both regular physical checkups and meditation-based therapy are included. Every week, each employee will be called separately to the doctors’ offices, where they will sit in a chair, close their eyes, and let the doctors do their job so that they can do theirs.

The official term for these visits is _routine practical clinicals_ , and they’re integrated seamlessly into the employees’ schedules.

Gerard doesn’t remember most of what happens during the clinicals. The doctor calls them _cleansings_.

Mind wiping—cleaning. Scrubbing the inside of his skull.

His eyes are always closed, and he lies there, listening to the faint sounds of static and muffled voices drifting through his mind.

He always feels empty after he’s finished with one of these sessions, like he’s been washed out on the inside, light and hollow.

He thinks he feels better after the clinicals.

Probably he does.

He’s learned that when his mind tells him that he _thinks_ he should feel something, it actually means that he _does_ feel something.

Sometimes he talks to Korse before or after the cleansings. Korse is usually in the area because he works in the department close to the doctors’ offices. Talking to Korse is the only time Gerard really feels like he’s not sleepwalking.

The thing about taking certain pills is that you build up a tolerance to the drugs involved.

It isn’t supposed to work that way.

After three months of interning for Better Living Industries, the training process is finally over, and the new employees gather to celebrate.

They’ve been working together for months, and many have known each other since long before the job, but Gerard still finds it difficult to remember their names. He identifies them by their faces, the muted colors of their hair, other small details. Remembering names seems like too much work. Unless it’s someone like Korse, in which case it’s—easier.

He doesn’t know why it’s easier.

Korse is just more _there_.

The party is in someone’s house, not at BL-HQ, and it’s only a few minutes into the event when someone brings out a couple containers of pills. They aren’t the usual muted, dull colors of regulation medications; these are bright and flashy and colorful.

Contraband, he thinks. His stomach turns over.

Colors come from the Lobby, from the terrorist sympathizers and drug dealers and black-market smugglers; colors come from breaking the law, breaking BL Codes, breaking the steady pattern of society.

Regulation pills are no longer enough; something else must be added to the mix.

New sensations. New emotions.

He thinks, they would fire us all if anyone found out about this.

Any form of medication not approved by Better Living Industries is strictly illegal, seriously so; penalties for possessing contraband materials are said to be severe and unavoidable. There are certain medications that can give you the floating, airy feeling that the restricted substances provide, if you want them.

For the right price, of course.

He’s old enough to know about what goes on in the crumbling streets of the Lobby—about the pills that can give you whatever sensation you want for the duration of the trip; the pornodroids who stand on street corners waiting for customers; the wireheads who tap directly into the city’s electric current to get high.

He just didn’t think that the employees of Better Living Industries would do something like this.

Someone offers him a plastic cup of unidentifiable liquid and a bright green pill capsule; he takes them both without thinking.

He drinks.

The taste is bitter, and it burns his throat when he swallows. It doesn’t taste like water.

His head hurts.

Someone offers him an apologetic look; the pain must be obvious on his face. “It gets better, kid, just wait it out,” she says, setting a gentle hand on his arm. Her eyes are huge, nearly all pupil, dark and wide. “First high’s always the best, once you start feeling it.”

“I—” He licks his lips. “Okay.”

It finally hits him a few moments later, and he almost doubles over; his head is buzzing and pounding with sensation. He presses one hand against the wall and tries to will his legs to stop shaking so he can stand.

It feels like a thousand tiny explosions are going off just underneath his skin. It feels like when he and Mikey were younger and took apart his FlatScreen and found the batteries inside; it feels like when he’d tentatively touched the tip of his tongue to the end of the battery and received an electric shock. His whole mouth had tingled with the burst of electricity.

It’s intoxicating. He pushes himself upright just to slip down the wall again, legs giving out; the room is a colorful whirl of lights and sounds and vague silhouettes of shadowy figures flickering in and out of existence like bad reception on a television screen, flashing with all the colors of SMPTE bars. It feels like he’s tasting something better than he’s ever tasted, like he’s pumped up on adrenaline, like he’s coming in his fucking pants, over and over. He registers vaguely that his mouth is open; he can’t feel his fingertips, can’t make his hands move.

His vision tilts sideways. It feels like he’s falling endlessly, even though he isn’t moving; the sensation pulses through him in waves, pushing him around like he’s a ragdoll, limp and helpless against the current.

He learns that most forms of contraband are far more prevalent than he had previously thought, especially higher within Better Living Industries.

Except he hadn’t thought, not really; he’d just kind of numbly gone along with whatever he was told.

He almost starts to wonder if this means that even Korse has hidden contraband items, and what kinds of items they might potentially be, but even thinking about that sort of thing makes his head hurt, so he stops trying to figure anything else out.

It’s remarkably easy to obtain more illegal pills.

The first time he buys some off a coworker whose name he doesn’t even try to remember, a disguised bottle of contraband in exchange for a few spare carbons, he thinks, Mikey would kill me if he knew.

The second time, he doesn’t think about Mikey at all.

Taking the illegal pills makes him feel more awake, almost, which is weird because normally he wants to sleep all the time. It’s a confusing relationship that he has with the pills. Sometimes he wants to feel that hyper thrum just underneath his skin, so awake that he feels almost as though he could break through the walls and burn up the whole damn city. Sometimes he wants to feel nothing at all, just curl up in bed under the covers with his headphones on, listening to the soothing meaningless noise in the background, and sleep and sleep and _sleep_ _forever_.

He starts taking the pills more and more, cutting a portion of his salary, trading carbons for contraband. He doesn’t think anybody at work notices the change, and he doesn’t spend enough time with Mikey or their father for them to catch on.

He doesn’t let himself think about what will happen when someone inevitably does figure it out.

He knows what they would do to him.

The day after the first time he gets so high he blacks out on the floor of his room, the world goes on as normal. No one gives him the knowing looks he expected, no one frowns in sympathy—their smiles are the same too-bright and too-wide artificialities that every Better Living employee wears.

Nothing has changed.

Even Korse doesn’t seem to treat him any differently when Gerard runs into him before the routine clinical scheduled for that day. Korse greets him cordially as usual and folds his hands as he takes a seat next to Gerard on the bench outside the doctor’s office.

They exchange the usual pleasantries.

Korse asks about his job, how he’s liking his time working with Better Living Industries now that he’s an official employee, how the clinicals have been going. He doesn’t ask about contraband, or possibly breaking the law, or Mikey and the illegal flash drive of music hidden underneath his mattress that he thinks nobody knows about.

Gerard allows himself two seconds to hope.

He thinks, maybe it’s still okay.

Maybe no one has figured it out.

“I think the clinicals have really been helping my performance during work hours as well as at home,” says Gerard; he doesn’t know why it feels like a lie. He’s found it’s easier to lie to people if the lie is something they want to believe. Or expect to hear. “I’m glad that everyone has the opportunity to better themselves.”

“Rumor has it that you used to be quite the troublemaker yourself, before you came to work with the company,” Korse says, and Gerard’s heart skips a momentary beat, but Korse sounds amused, not angry. “I’ve read your file—pardon me, natural curiosity. And doing my job, of course. What drew you to the museums, if I may ask?”

Gerard hesitates, hoping his voice won’t break when he tries to answer.

He forces himself to uncurl his fingers from where they’ve been digging into the soft skin of his palms.

“The—the art, I guess. I was just curious about it, I didn’t know it was—bad for me. But the doctors adjusted some of my medications and now it’s no longer a problem,” he hastens to add, “Sir.”

No longer a problem, he thinks. The pills make everything go away.

“No need for formalities, Gerard, this isn’t quite the same setting as during work hours, even if it technically is.” Korse waves a hand easily. “I’m not concerned in the least about your interest in the history of art and artistry—I myself am drawn to beautiful things. It’s part of human nature, don’t you think? Some might argue that it’s wrong to deny ourselves a part of our own psyche. That it’s damaging.”

“Um, I think—” There’s a trick question with only one right answer hidden somewhere in Korse’s particular choice of phrasing, Gerard thinks frantically. _Shit_. “Provided it doesn’t cross a line, of course—that’s why we separate harmful art from the benign. Nothing exists in a vacuum.”

“Too true,” says Korse, pondering, “too true. Humans are instinctively attracted to shiny things, for example, which often leads us to place ourselves in dangerous situations due to instinctual animalistic values, instead of our reason. That’s where our developed frontal cortex comes in handy.” He touches just the tips of his first two fingers to Gerard’s forehead, and Gerard tries and fails to stop himself from holding his breath. “We can recognize that just because something is shiny and pretty doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful for us. We like to play with fire, but we don’t like to get burnt.”

“Yes,” says Gerard, and feels the loss of skin-on-skin contact sharply as Korse pulls back his fingers. “I—I agree.”

The doctor calls his name, and he breathes out slowly, and stands up. He notices almost as an afterthought that his legs are shaky and unsteady, and he nearly stumbles on his way to the door.

One night he can’t get to sleep no matter how many regulation pills he takes. Their father works night shifts, so it’s just him and Mikey in the house most nights. They eat dinner together, then go to bed; sometimes Mikey stays on the couch for a while longer to watch TV. Gerard thinks occasionally about joining him, but even the black-and-white animations of Mousekat make his head hurt, and the voices are too shrill and piercing.

He waits until Mikey is asleep to retrieve the pills. They’re shimmering slightly when he pours them out into his hand; he doesn’t think that’s supposed to happen.

He can’t remember.

The sleep medication comes in the form of tiny, pastel blue capsules marked with the recommended dosages. They fill his palm with a reassuring weight.

He fills up a glass with water from the kitchen sink and swallows the pills.

The kitchen walls feel like they’re closing around him, so he takes the medications and the glass of water back to their bedroom.

He doesn’t look at the labels, except for the methylphenidates he takes before meals because he knows that if he crushes some of the tablets that he’s supposed to take in smaller doses before each meal, the dizziness and floating feeling will come over him faster and he won’t have to wait as long before he can stop feeling like he’s going to burst out of his skin if he has to breathe and endure for a single moment longer.

The crushed powder is more difficult to swallow when he feels like there’s something stuck in his throat, but it mercifully doesn’t taste like anything inedible, just a faint hint of the salt from his own sweat when he uncaps another bottle of the pills with trembling hands.

He thinks about how he knows that if he takes too many of the little blue pills he could overdose. It’s been explained that too much of a good thing can be harmful, everything in moderation, controlled doses of medication.

He doesn’t want to kill himself.

He just wants to stop feeling like his head is going to explode without notice, leaving blood and brains splattered all over the walls for Mikey to find the next morning.

He just—

He just wants to be able to _sleep_.

Even the constant low light in his bedroom hurts his eyes.

His breathing sounds too loud and too quick in his ears.

He doesn’t know how to make himself calm down if the medications aren’t working.

His fingers are starting to hurt.

The pills are still sparkling, sliding around in his hands like living things; they slip from his fingertips when he tries to grab for them, skittering across the floor.

There’s a headache building behind his eyes.

His skin feels tight and buzzing and stretched-out, like if he brushes against anything solid he’ll fall apart.

He thinks, I have to make it stop.

His hands are shaking.

It feels like there are sharp splinters digging into his wrists. He rubs his thumb against his palm, hoping to alleviate the feeling, but his hand slips and lands heavily on the corner of the bed instead.

 _I don’t know how to make it stop_.

His head hurts.

The pills gleam from the floor, but when he reaches down to scoop them up, they ripple through his fingers like water.

He stumbles out of his room and into the bathroom he and Mikey share.

The door has a lock that can only be opened with a passcard. At first he can’t close the door, then he can’t make his hands move to lock it; he doesn’t know how much time has passed. There’s something blurring on the edges of his vision like TV static, and it worsens if he turns his head too fast.

He keeps the contraband pills hidden underneath the sink. It takes him a few tries to open the bottle.

He doesn’t remember when he sits down on the floor, but he notices vaguely that his legs are shaking.

His mouth hurts.

He gets another bottle of pills. They mix with the clear taste of the filtered water from the sink; it almost burns his throat when he swallows.

More pills, he thinks. He just wants to sleep. He pulls apart the capsules and pours the powder into his palm, then drinks and drinks and crushes more pills and swallows them until his reflection in the mirror is blurred and shaky, and his hands don’t look like they should belong to something human.

His skin is covered in glitter.

He doesn’t know if it’s real or not. He doesn’t want to brush it off, in case it is.

Mikey finds him eventually, lying curled on the floor and staring at his hands as they flicker and distort in front of his eyes. He’s forgotten Mikey has his own passcard for the bathroom door.

“I’m gonna call dad home from work,” says Mikey, his voice high and thin and terrified, his silhouette just a sharp and jagged shadow that’s inconsistent in the rectangle of light, “I’m gonna call the doctor—”

“ _No_ ,” Gerard manages to croak as loudly as he can, and tugs his knees up to his chest, shivering and sick. The tile floor is smooth and cool against his hot cheek, like it’s made of ice. “Don’t call anyone—please don’t.”

Mikey stops moving and just lingers there, wide-eyed and worried in the doorway.

There’s a thin halo of light all around his body, but Gerard doesn’t know if that’s just his messed-up vision or if his brother really is glowing. He wishes he could take a picture. He thinks about Mikey’s tenth birthday, when he was given a digital camera, and for weeks afterwards he wouldn’t stop taking photographs of everything.

Eventually Mikey kneels down next to him and touches Gerard’s cheek with his fingertips, quick and light. Gerard thinks of Korse touching his forehead before the clinicals, thinks of Mikey finding him lying there on the floor of the bathroom. Somewhere along the way, the two incidents have become confused.

His skin isn’t shimmering anymore. The pills are just pills, lying discarded on the bathroom floor.

Mikey’s fingers are so gentle when he brushes the hair out of Gerard’s eyes that it’s almost heartbreaking.

He says, “Can you stand up?”

***

The steady whirring of the temp controls is impossibly loud. It sounds like it’s out to get him, grind him up into a paste. Mikey doesn’t know what to do.

He feels sick to his stomach even thinking about the limited options he has. He doesn’t know if he should give Gerard an ultimatum, or if he should ignore what he’d promised before and just call their father to come home to fix everything.

For some reason, he doesn’t know if their father would be able to fix everything.

He doesn’t really want to find out.

He’s out of his depth. He can’t stop looking at the pills scattered all across the tile floor.

He desperately doesn’t want to think about what could have happened if he hadn’t found Gerard, if he hadn’t had his own key to the bathroom. He thinks, he could have died. I could have lost him too.

Then he thinks, _too?_ because he isn’t sure why he thought that, when he hasn’t lost anyone else before.

It takes him a moment to remember Ray.

The nausea comes back suddenly, and he closes his eyes and breathes through his nose, clenching his hands into fists.

He finally gets Gerard to their room and into bed; he’s still in his dirty and stained work clothes, with the Better Living Industries logo on the shirt pocket.

He drags the trashcan over to the bed and holds back his brother’s hair when he throws up sleep meds and pill capsules and stomach bile.

While Gerard is sleeping off the mess he made of himself, Mikey steels himself and goes into the bathroom again. He gathers up the pills that are still on the floor and most of the ones in the cabinets and flushes them down the toilet. He pours out the water that’s left in the mug down the sink.

He doesn’t know what to do next, much less how to do it.

He stands there in the bathroom, trying not to panic. He looks into the mirror with his hands full of plastic pill bottles; the room is starting to spin in circles around him. Just looking at his reflection keeps him grounded.

Gerard has always taken care of him. He doesn’t know how to handle it when everything suddenly turns the other way around.

Thirty seconds, he thinks.

Half a minute.

He allows himself thirty seconds of falling apart, then he gets himself back together and throws all the pills he can’t flush into a plastic bag he takes from the kitchen, with the trademark Better Living Industries smiling face on it. He has enough presence of mind to scrape off the labels from the medication containers that say Gerard’s full name and personal ID number, but he doesn’t know where to throw away the stuff now that he’s got it all in one bag, so he just leaves it in the brick alley behind their house and then runs back inside and locks the door, paranoid that someone will have seen.

He waits, heart in his throat, for draculoids to break down the door and drag him away for breaking the law.

Nothing happens.

He forces himself to inhale; exhale.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says out loud to the empty house.

The only noise he gets in return is the quiet whirring of the automated systems. It’s very nearly a comfort.

He’s admitted something and received nothing in return.

Familiarity.

Gerard sleeps for a while, restless and shivering.

Mikey sits on the bed beside him and just watches him. He looks calmer when he sleeps, more focused somehow when he isn’t conscious. It’s almost reassuring, to think that underneath everything else he’s still the same person he was when he would make up stories for Mikey when they were cuddled up together in the same bed, scared of the dark.

He almost drifts off himself, exhausted and stressed, then is jolted awake when Gerard starts screaming.

The screaming stops once Gerard wakes up fully, but then he starts sobbing, thrashing wildly at the blankets he’s tangled himself up in. Mikey grabs onto him and tries to hold him down, terrified and with his heart in his throat. Gerard shoves and kicks at him and fumbles for the nightstand where the bedtime medications are supposed to be. Mikey threw them out with the rest of the little bottles.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he coughs, his voice raw from throwing up and screaming and dehydration, “god damn it. Where are my—”

“Gerard,” says Mikey, trying to pull him back, “G, hey, stop it.”

“There’s more meds in the bathroom,” Gerard mumbles, eyes unfocused, and tries again to get up. Mikey throws himself bodily at him and they both fall backwards onto the bed, Gerard still struggling to get loose. “Mikey, let me go, I need—I wanna sleep, I can’t—make it stop make it stop make it—let me _go_ —”

“You can’t do this anymore,” Mikey says, raising his voice, thinking it might help the message to get through. “Stop _fighting_ me, idiot, I’m trying to help.”

“Get the fuck off me—I need—”

“I threw them away!” Mikey yells, shoving Gerard back onto the bed again. “I flushed all the sleep meds, and I got rid of the—the _pills_ too, so you can’t have any of it anymore, okay? You need to _stop_ it. C’mon, G. _Listen_ to me.”

Gerard starts crying again, then, shaking violently and holding onto the blankets on the bed like he can’t relax his fingers from their grip on the fabric, and it’s scary. There really isn’t a better word to describe the fear that comes from everything that’s happened in the past few hours.

 _Scared_ , Mikey thinks. He can admit that much.

He is so terribly frightened.

He feels like he’s been catapulted into the position of the older brother, or the parent. He doesn’t know how to handle a situation like this, and he keeps being reminded of it. There’s a nagging voice in the back of his head that keeps telling him that he should have called their father and the authorities in the first place.

He’s glad he didn’t do that, though, because he knows with absolute clarity now that if he had, they would have taken Gerard away from him. They would have separated the two of them and sent Gerard to some rehabilitation program to punish him for having contraband, and he would come back drugged up and mindless if he even came back at all.

Mikey doesn’t want that scenario.

He has to make it through this. He doesn’t want them to be separated, so he has to make it through this.

He goes to the bathroom to wash his hands again. He wipes down the sink and scrubs off the floor, then leans against the wall for a moment and closes his eyes. At least the screaming has stopped.

He thinks, this is the sort of thing I’m grateful for now. He almost feels like laughing.

When he walks back into the room, Gerard is still curled up around himself on the bed, but there’s another open bottle of some unknown type of pills in his hand, and his eyes are shut tight. He must have swallowed them dry.

Mikey stomps over and snatches the container out of his hands; the remaining pills rattle loudly against the plastic. “What the hell, G, I was gone for five minutes, where did you even _get_ this?”

“’S underneath the, th’ mattress,” Gerard slurs, shivering violently and reaching out, up, towards Mikey, “’n case someone found the others—can I have that back, ’m so—I jus’ wanna sleep, Mikes, I just want it to stop, c’mon—”

“Sometimes I hate you so much,” Mikey groans, but he makes sure that there aren’t any other contraband stashes in places that Gerard could reach before he pours out the pills into the toilet. He doesn’t want to risk going outside again with the empty bottle, so he scrapes off the label and throws it away before filling up the bottle with some of his own headache medications and leaving it on the table so it looks innocent enough. It’ll have to do for now. He can’t waste time on anything more.

Gerard hasn’t moved at all this time when Mikey goes back into their room. There aren’t any new bottles of pills clutched in his hands; his eyes are open, dark, looking up at his brother quietly.

“How many did you take?”

Gerard tenses when Mikey sits down on the bed again; his eyelids twitch. He shrugs, barely noticeable.

Mikey exhales. “You stupid idiot,” he breathes, and grabs Gerard’s shoulders. “C’mon, roll over.”

“Don’ wanna,” Gerard mumbles, but he flops heavily onto his side when Mikey gets one arm around his waist and pushes. Mikey wraps his palm underneath Gerard’s chin and steels himself. He has to be _here_. He has to be.

He forces Gerard’s mouth open and shoves his fingers as far into his throat as he can, fingernails scraping the back of his tongue; Gerard gags and tries to flail away, but Mikey clings on tighter and pushes against the roof of his mouth, trying to tune out the horrible choking sounds as Gerard tries to suck in air. Gerard coughs and shakes, then spits Mikey’s fingers out and retches into the trashcan still sitting next to the bed. A thin trail of bile and saliva dribbles from his mouth.

“Shit.” Mikey wipes his fingers on the sleeve of Gerard’s work shirt—it probably can’t get any grosser than it already is—and tries not to inhale too deeply. Gerard heaves again, curling his fists into his stomach.

Mikey shifts his other arm until he can push Gerard’s hair back, out of his face. Gerard runs his tongue over his teeth, wincing. He’s shivering against Mikey’s side.

There are half-dissolved pill capsules and tablets mixed in with the stomach acid and puke. Mikey doesn’t want to think about it, but he can’t seem to look away.

He holds back Gerard’s hair when he vomits up the rest of the pills and keeps retching even after there’s nothing left in his stomach to get rid of. Mikey fetches a washcloth and cleans off his mouth, careful in each movement, then sits down gingerly on the bed next to his brother.

Gerard spits into the trashcan, then wipes his mouth shakily, smearing saliva and bile across his chin. He smells like puke and sweat and the latex scent of Better Living Industries, but Mikey doesn’t think he could get him back into the bathroom to clean up any more.

He opens his eyes blearily, rubbing at his face. His lips are cracked from dehydration.

Mikey shifts on the bed, and Gerard looks up at him pathetically.

“Mikes,” he mumbles. “M’so tired, I jus’ wanna . . .”

Sleep, Mikey finishes for him. He knows. He just doesn’t know what to do. He knows about Gerard’s nightmares, even the ones Gerard doesn’t tell him about; he always wakes up when his brother screams or, worse, makes helpless little choking noises, like he wants to scream and cry but is terrified of being found.

He doesn’t have nightmares, not the same way Gerard does. Gerard’s dreams are explosive and horrific; his head is full of _too much_. Mikey’s brain doesn’t have _enough_. He doesn’t dream about anything, not really. The closest he comes is when he knows what Gerard is dreaming about.

Mikey has a sudden thought. “Hey, hang on,” he says, and runs over to his own bed, grabbing his headphones and the hidden flash drive of music from underneath the mattress. He shows it cautiously to Gerard. “Here, there’s music, it—it helps me when I need to get to sleep or have a headache or something, you could try that?”

Gerard has a job at BL-HQ, Mikey thinks, feeling nauseated.

He thinks, this could end very poorly if he decides to get self-righteous.

But Gerard doesn’t mention the illegality of the situation, just takes the headphones obediently and curls up in the bed again.

He’s pale and sweating and looks absolutely awful. His hair is greasy and he clearly hasn’t been using the shower the way it’s supposed to be used in a while. His lips are dry and he still reeks of vomit.

Mikey sits with him anyway and strokes his hair and Gerard moves into the touch like a cat, except not really like a cat, because pets aren’t kept in the home. There are cats and dogs in schools sometimes, for stress and therapy, but not at home. Mikey’s always wanted a cat; Gerard used to tell him stories about what a potential cat would be like, about cats as big as houses that you could ride on. He doesn’t have a cat, but he has Gerard, who needs him, and that’s far more important than anything else.

They’re still sitting on Gerard’s bed listening to music quietly when their father comes home from work the next morning and starts making them all breakfast.

It isn’t going to be easy.

This hits Mikey again the next morning when he has to deal with the fact that Gerard is still expected to go in to work that day.

Mikey goes to the phone.

He calls BL-HQ and hopes desperately that he sounds enough like Gerard through the phone that he can pull this off. His hands are trembling so badly that he almost misdials the number more than once.

The receptionist’s desk answers.

“Hello, this is Gerard,” says Mikey, then adds their last name as a panicked afterthought. His voice is shaking slightly. He inhales. “I’m not feeling well—I think I’m going to have to stay home today.”

There’s a pause.

His heart lodges in his throat. He can’t breathe properly.

The receptionist says carefully, “All right. Standard protocol states that any employee with a communicable disease should be quarantined at home or in another suitable sterile enclosure for three days, after which they should see a doctor for a physical and a referral if any further medicine is necessary. Is that satisfactory?”

Mikey swallows. “Yeah,” he says, “I mean, yes. Thank you. Ah—keep smiling.”

“Have a better day!” says the receptionist cheerfully, and hangs up.

Three days. He sets down the phone and bends over, digging his fists into his stomach, trying to breathe slowly.

He can’t even begin to imagine the sort of trouble they both would be in if they’re somehow discovered.

He doesn’t want to try.

He thinks, it might actually have helped that he was so scared he could barely breathe, because Gerard’s voice is higher-pitched than his is normally.

It feels like the sort of detail he should be fixating on.

But Gerard gets three days of respite, provided he sees the doctor at the end of it. There’s no avoiding the doctor’s visits, since they’re built into work hours, but Mikey will worry about that later. Therapy isn’t as big of a concern, since they just give you the meds and expect you to take them.

***

The first time he can get more pills is at work, when one of his coworkers whose name he tries momentarily to remember notices the dark circles underneath his eyes and the way he’s jumpy and stuttering all throughout the day, and hands him a couple of bottles of different meds out of sympathy. Gerard doesn’t even know what most of them are supposed to do, but he swallows them anyway as soon as he can and throws them back up a few minutes later in the bathroom, still in his white work uniform, shaking from withdrawal and exhaustion.

When he looks at himself in the mirror, he looks like he feels.

He looks like a wreck.

He wonders, absently and with a sick undercurrent of desire, what would happen if someone figures out what happened. He almost longs to be discovered.

The nightmares start again the next night. He had kind of hoped they would stay away even after he stopped taking the pills, but when he opens his eyes, the droid is standing there, looking forlorn.

He tries to close his eyes again, but he can’t move. He thinks, oh come on.

 _Hey, kid_ , says the droid, sounding miserable. Its metal throat is raspy. _Been a while_.

What do you want from me this time? he wants to say.

His mouth isn’t working properly.

 _Don’t you think it’s getting pretty cramped in here? You know, what with the both of us vying for the position of the real honcho_.

I didn’t ask for this, he thinks. I didn’t ask for you to be in my head.

The droid sighs with a sound like metal scraping on concrete. _No one ever asks to have a fucked-up brain, kiddo. You’re not the first little roach to complain about being a conduit, I promise you. The most I can offer you is my word that it won’t be forever_.

He doesn’t try to say anything. He thinks, just stay away from my brother.

 _Ah. Your brother_.

“Leave him alone,” Gerard growls, and he’s so preoccupied with channeling every bit of ferocity he can call up into that statement that it takes him a moment to realize that he’s managed to speak aloud.

The droid doesn’t move, just regards him with its empty eye sockets. There’s something undeniably creepy about that stare, something purely inhuman, something only present in pre-war droids, before biosynthetic plasticine skin was inserted into the mechanisms of the machinery.

His lungs feel like they’re full of cement. He has to struggle to breathe.

_Don’t worry, kid, there are always ways to get rid of the hallucinations if you want. Swallow a pill or twenty, plug yourself into the screen, attach a wire to your eyes for an eternal vacation into endless fame and happiness. But you already tried that, didn’t you? It didn’t work out so well, did it?_

He wakes up gasping and with the sheets wrapped around his neck, choking him.

Mikey is hovering over him, hand gripping his shirt like he’s been trying to shake him awake. “G, hey, it’s okay, it’s just a dream, I’m still here.”

Gerard rolls over and buries his face in the pillow. His throat is sore and his eyes hurt. He wants more of the pills; he wants to feel like he felt that first time. “I know,” he mumbles.

He isn’t eating much, or drinking enough water throughout the day, except for when he has to or when Mikey sits with him and refuses to leave until he finishes the food or the glass of cold water from the sink.

He knows his body is fighting both the drugs and being off them.

Mikey is endlessly patient, and Gerard tries not to feel too terribly guilty, but he can’t summon the energy to dispel the nauseating twist of guilt. It takes so much effort, even thinking of everything he wants to say to Mikey.

He knows he’s a bad older brother. He doesn’t try to explain this to Mikey, though, because then Mikey would get upset and he doesn’t want that.

He still has nightmares every night and wakes up every time just as he starts to scream.

Mikey is always already awake. They end up sleeping in the same bed after a few nights of this, huddled up together under the blankets in a bed that’s only designed for one teenage boy, not two, and it’s too tight a squeeze for either of them to move properly but neither is willing to give it up.

“You ever feel like your skin doesn’t fit? Or, or it _does_ fit, but it _shouldn’t_ fit?”

M is quiet for a long while. “I dunno,” he says finally.

“Like.” G hesitates. “I don’t always feel like I should be who, or I don’t know, maybe _what_ , I am. I don’t know exactly. It’s weird when people talk to me because then I have to remember I exist to them too.”

Or when people talk about him— _oh, that’s ____, he’s _____. The reminder that he isn’t just a figment of a collective imagination.

M frowns. “Maybe it’s because you stopped taking the pills,” he says. “Maybe it’ll get better.”

“Yeah,” G says, relieved, “yeah, the pills, that’s probably what it was. I’ll get better.”

Gerard is almost completely off the meds after only a few weeks, and he starts to notice things anew. Emotions come back slowly, trickling in piece by piece, and he doesn’t really know how to deal with them once they’re there.

He still goes to therapy, still trusts that Better Living Industries is doing the right thing. He doesn’t want to think about the possibility that they aren’t, because that would mean that his entire life has been one lie after another.

He doesn’t want to admit that he’s frightened.

He knows that he came close to dying. He knows that Mikey saved him. He isn’t exactly sure why, but he’s not going to deny Mikey what he wants, so he’ll avoid the pills when he can if it makes his brother happy.

Two weeks into being off the meds, Gerard remembers that Mikey has friends of his own, and that he’s been spending all his free time with Gerard instead of them. He knows Mikey sometimes doesn’t talk about things unless he’s prompted, and often doesn’t like to talk about personal things, so he decides to bring it up first.

He asks, “Hey, Mikey, are you still friends with Ray and those guys?” He doesn’t actually know the names of any of Mikey’s other friends, but he thinks Mikey must have them.

Mikey shifts uncomfortably and looks away. “Um,” he says. “Well.”

Gerard feels like the worst person in the entire world when Mikey explains briefly what happened to Ray. He apologizes over and over, but Mikey just shrugs, expressionless, and says he doesn’t really want to talk about it. What’s done is done, he says, I asked a few people and nobody even seemed to remember who he was.

There’s nothing else to do but grit your teeth and move on, Mikey says, and Gerard doesn’t push the issue, but he looks at his brother and wonders if Mikey sincerely believes what he’s saying.

That doesn’t stop Gerard from dwelling on it, however.

He’s distracted the entire day at work, even when he’s plugging in numbers and should be focusing. He thinks about Ray’s perpetual cheerfulness, and his expansive love of the universe, and feels absolutely disgusted with himself.

The numbers he’s been running are medication levels and m-mods for different demographics of citizens in Battery City, divided up by Sectors. The Sectors within the city mirror the Zones within the desert. Gerard is absent-mindedly scrolling through lists and lists of data when something abruptly clicks in his head and he suddenly feels like he’s going to throw up.

“Shit,” he mutters, then groans internally because all forms of profanity are prohibited inside BL-HQ.

He can only hope nobody heard him, or at least that no one will bother to scroll through the security camera footage of that day.

But it’s not like anyone from the higher-ups tends to check on some random underling—he’s just filing lists of m-mods, occasionally breaking BL codes, just your ordinary casual workday.

M-mods, he thinks. Memory modification processes.

Special drugs, the kind of drugs that could make you forget things—conversations, promises, even people. He thinks about what Mikey told him— _nobody even seemed to remember who he was_.

He thinks, oh god please no.

He goes to the database that records the m-mods, and scrolls back to 2025, when he was six and Mikey was three, and there it is.

PERMANENT MEMORY MODIFICATION PROCESS c.f26675R[doc]: NOREPINEPHRINE NEUROTRANSMITTER SUPPRESSANTS [routine benzodiazepine and propranolol injection(s)] PERFORMED upon GERARD [b2019] and MICHAEL [b2022] XXX on XXXXX XX 2025. PERSONAL REMOVAL: MOTHER [REPLACED by R.A.M. UNIT].

Then a meaningless string of numbers and something else he doesn’t have the adequate clearance to access.

Gerard closes the file and erases his history just to be safe.

He stares blankly at the computer screen.

He doesn’t know how to process what he’s discovered. The first emotion that comes through is anger—he’s furious, abruptly, at Better Living, at whoever exchanged their mother for a robotic alternative. He can’t even remember what she was supposed to look like, anything she did, how her voice sounded. He doesn’t know why he knew that the memory modifications were done in 2025.

He wonders if Mikey knows, if he’s thought about it at all. He thinks about telling him and feels suddenly sick to his stomach. He doesn’t know if he can tell Mikey the truth.

“Why do you listen to your headphones so much?” Mikey asks sleepily that night. “Yours are just noise.”

They’re lying in their separate beds; the nightmares haven’t started yet. Gerard considers his answer, thinks about scrolling through lines of code and endless deleted memories. He wonders when Mikey started separating _music_ from _noise_. He wonders if Mikey remembers their mother.

“The noise makes the noise in my head stop,” he says, finally. The pills used to do that too, for a while, when he needed to sleep without the bad dreams. Mikey doesn’t challenge him, so he thinks maybe he understands. He hopes simultaneously that Mikey does understand and that he doesn’t have a clue what it’s like. He doesn’t want Mikey to feel like he does, but he also doesn’t want to be alone.

He thinks about telling Mikey, for the thousandth time since he first found out. He thinks about what their father might say, if their father even remembers that he had a wife at one point. He thinks about finding their mother and bringing her back. He determinedly doesn’t think about the alternative.

He starts, “Do you ever think,” then stops. He doesn’t want to ruin it.

Mikey mumbles something unintelligible. He’s probably already asleep, Gerard thinks, and hugs his pillow tightly to his chest. He doesn’t close his eyes because then that would be giving in. It’s pointless to delay the inevitable, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to try his hardest for as long as he can.

With the newly minted emotions careening through him, he feels everything _too_ _much_. He feels constantly raw and tender, hollowed out and full to bursting all at once. It’s better when he’s with Mikey. Mikey works kind of like the headphones—he stops the noise.

He makes the decision to leave the inner Sectors the next morning.

He wakes up before the alarm goes off from a dream where he’d been standing on a hill overlooking the city while everything was on fire. He could feel the heat of the flames getting closer and closer, licking hungrily at his skin, but he couldn’t move his legs and he couldn’t even close his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see his flesh start to burn.

Mikey is still curled up beside him, his mouth slightly open. He looks peaceful and much younger when he sleeps, without his glasses guarding his eyes. He never did go back to the doctor for the laser corrective surgery, although he could have years ago. Gerard brushes the hair out of Mikey’s eyes and thinks, I won’t let anyone hurt him.

He gets to work an hour before he’s supposed to arrive, and logs into his usual computer. His hands are shaking slightly on the keyboard.

The data are all there where he left them, lists and lists of pills and shots and vaccines and m-mods. He goes to the search bar, holds his breath, and types in MIKEY.

Nothing comes up.

Gerard exhales slowly, and types in MICHAEL.

There are hundreds of Michaels living within Battery City, not to mention in the Lobby and the outskirts of the city; it takes some filtering and scrolling to find the right one.

He learns that Mikey has had his memory modified three times—once, the first time, when he was three and their mother was replaced by a droid (a robotic alternative mothering unit from Parenting Device Dispatching Services, a voice whispers treacherously in the back of his head); the second time when he first got his glasses, for some unexplained reason; and lastly, the third time, when their mother was taken and replaced by their father, or some version of him.

He goes to his own file next, not because he really wants to know what it says, but because he thinks Mikey would deserve to know.

Apparently _his_ memory has only been changed twice (both times relating to their mother, from what he can tell from the minimal notes made in the file record), but there’s a note that says, _Prescribed a 50pg dosage of norepinephrine suppressants [benzodiazepine], 7/xx; dosage increased to 100pg, 3/xx; dosage increased to 150pg, 4/xx_.

That explains the empty, floating feeling, and the lapses in memory, then, he thinks, and almost wants to laugh. It feels so strange to suddenly have such a simple explanation for everything that hadn’t added up.

He almost doesn’t want to search for Ray, but he owes this to Mikey as well.

When he types in RAY, no matching results appear; there are plenty of Rays, but not the one he’s looking for. He backspaces and tries RAYMOND.

Still nothing.

He doesn’t know if that’s better than if there had been a record.

The next thing he searches for is their names in the database of the regular pills.

He learns that the medications that Better Living has been prescribing to everyone in the city since birth _for the health and safety of our citizens!_ are a combination of methylphenidates and dextroamphetamines, aliases Ritalin and Adderall, along with a personalized cocktail of various other drugs, individualized for each person. The drugs are meant to control the city’s population, to keep them addicted, to keep them sedated.

The realization that Better Living Industries has been manipulating their minds since birth isn’t a comfortable thought to explore.

He isn’t sure at first if his reaction to the knowledge is normal—he doesn’t quite know how to handle the emotions he feels. He hasn’t had years of adjustment like Mikey has. But he has to think on his feet for Mikey’s sake, and that thought is what keeps him going when he wants to curl up and go to sleep forever.

He doesn’t think, what Better Living Industries is doing is wrong. He thinks, what Better Living Industries is doing is hurting me and my brother, and I have to do something about it.

Everything feels numb and inevitable. He closes the database, erases his history, and starts looking for a map of the city.

He doesn’t have the clearance to access a map of the Zones outside Battery City, but the Sectors’ blueprints are common currency, accessible to those even with the lower levels of clearance. There are transit maps and neighborhood maps and urban planning diagrams and, finally, a general map of the city with labels and lines and a series of confusing marks that seem to indicate carbon monoxide levels and oxygen quality and population density—which is supposed to be evenly spread out throughout the entire city, for safety reasons, so it’s a bit confusing at first why that would even be included. Even the Lobby has the same population density restrictions, right? It wouldn’t be safe otherwise.

He’s still trying to figure out the legend when he feels a hand on his shoulder and startles so badly he almost knocks the papers he’s been filing off the desk in a cascade.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” says Korse’s level, amused voice from behind him, and Gerard wants so badly to bang his head against the nearest solid surface. Every muscle in his body suddenly feels tense and aching.

“No, I was just—working on some extra work, I mean, I was sick before and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t behind on anything important,” Gerard lies, gritting his teeth and willing his breathing to slow somewhat. “Routine data checks, that sort of thing.”

“You’re here awfully early, then. Usually extra hours are added onto the end of the workday,” Korse notes. His hand is still heavy on Gerard’s shoulder.

“I didn’t want to have to stay late. My brother and I usually eat dinner together.”

“Your brother,” says Korse, smiling slightly. “Michael, am I correct?”

Gerard nods, perfunctory. He doesn’t know how much Korse knows about Mikey, but he isn’t about to give anything away unless he has to. And besides, they did have a tradition of eating dinner together, when they were both in school. It’s not technically a lie.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” says Korse, still sounding amused, and his hand lingers on Gerard’s shoulder for a moment longer before he leaves. Gerard rests his head on his keyboard and forces himself to breathe evenly, to calm his racing heartbeat.

He hates—

He hates how being around Korse always makes him feel simultaneously so unstable and so grounded.

“Excellent work, Gerard,” Korse says. One of his hands rests on the back of Gerard’s neck, almost lazily. The weight of his palm burns like a brand, red-hot metal against charred flesh. Gerard doesn’t know what to say.

Korse is a well-respected Exterminator, current head of the entire SCARECROW division. Formally he has no reason to check in on the data analysts. Gerard remembers him explaining it once, smiling politely at the occasional stilted joke and complimenting filing and sorting work. He had claimed he was remembering his roots.

Gerard both dreads and longs for these visits.

He’s become proficient at not flushing bright red when Korse touches him, claps him on the back and lets his hand linger.

“You’ve been progressing wonderfully at your position,” Korse says, leaning forwards to look over Gerard’s shoulder at the screen that shows a circular web of endless databases. “I would say you were long overdue for a promotion.”

“Thank you,” Gerard manages. “Sir,” he adds quickly.

“I should be thanking you,” Korse says, then Gerard is kneeling without being aware he was moving. The floor is hard against his knees. Korse sets a hand on the top of his head, smoothing his hair. “You’ve done well.”

Gerard doesn’t say anything. He can’t make his mouth open, form any words.

He can’t close his eyes.

Three seconds, he thinks, and tries to move his hands. His fingers twitch, unresponsive.

He exhales.

A dream, then. Sometimes he almost can’t tell; the situations feel too real and unreal almost at the same time. He doesn’t really like Korse as a person, but he still sometimes has dreams about him, and when he remembers them they mostly revolve around the concept of praise.

He doesn’t know when the dreams changed from Korse praising his work as a computer tech to Korse praising _him_.

These dreams don’t feel like the other nightmares he has about the droid; these dreams he knows aren’t real. He can try to make his hands move, but he can never convince his body to react the way he wants.

The dreams rarely go any further than just him kneeling and listening while Korse strokes his hair gently and murmurs compliments into his ear, but he still wakes up sweating and turned on enough that he can’t do anything but shove his hand into his pajama pants and jerk off quickly, biting his lip so he can stifle any noise he might make. It never takes very long before he comes.

If he does remember the dreams, he always feels like shit immediately afterwards, when he’s cleaning himself off in the bathroom before he goes back to bed. That doesn’t stop him from enjoying the fantasies while he’s experiencing them, though. He’s eighteen; of course he’s having weird sexual emotions. He isn’t stupid. He knows it’s probably not abnormal.

He knows how to keep real life separate from what’s in his head.

Korse is his _boss_ , after all, and he doesn’t even _like_ him.

He just—

He doesn’t know what he wants.

It’s just something that he doesn’t quite know how to explain. Some kind of magnetizing. So he jerks off with his eyes shut tight and one hand pressed over his mouth to keep himself quiet, thinking about Korse touching his hair and telling him how good he is, thinking about himself on his knees with his hands restrained so he can’t get himself off, thinking about the sensation of _touch_.

He feels guilty about it immediately afterwards, every time; the cycle repeats over and over again.

When he’s finally done with work for the day, he hesitates at the Hub where he usually gets on the bus to go back to the house. He feels like he’s flying a few inches above the ground, like there’s something bubbling in his chest, carrying him along. He gets on the next bus that will take him towards the Lobby, instead of the one that would take him home, and grips his knees tightly so his hands can’t do anything else stupid.

It’s started raining by the time he gets off the bus at the edge of the Lobby; the transit lines only go so far aboveground, and he doesn’t have the required passcard for the underground Hub. Gerard doesn’t have a raincoat or anything with him, just his gray hoodie and school backpack, so he ducks his head and hurries to stand under an awning while he gets his bearings and calms his heartbeat somewhat.

The Lobby is modeled after downtown Tokyo, except it looks more like downtown Tokyo a decade after it got bombed the second time.

The buildings are in the process of crumbling apart; the neon signs flicker in the sheets of rain; the alleyways are shadowy and the cobbled brick streets are cracked and chipped, heaps of junk scattered about—old broken TV sets, discarded scraps of junk technology, spare droid parts. Some of the windows are boarded up with cheap wooden paneling or covered in flapping plastic bags to keep out the worst of the bad weather.

There are people hurrying along the streets, heads bent against the wind and rain, coats pulled tight.

At the end of one street, he can make out a billboard that advertises Better Living’s new line of medications, the experimental ones with a combination of the usual methylphenidates and some other drug laced in, a mixture designed to induce comfort and pleasure.

The billboard shows a smiling woman holding up a bottle of nondescript pills. The line of text across the image says, in a simple and easy-to-read font, _We Can Take It From Here_. Beneath it, in smaller print— _The present is the focus. The aftermath is secondary. Let us help you_.

It’s the same words he’s been seeing nearly every day for most of his life. He ducks his head, feeling almost guilty. The slogans feel almost washed-up, insincere; he doesn’t know what’s changed.

There’s what appears to be a makeshift shrine set up against the brick wall next to the awning where he’s still standing, washed in the bright glow of the neon green sign above that proclaims _GREEN—SOOTHING/BUDGET SAVVY 750c!_ and flickers irregularly. The shrine—it has to be a shrine—is just a small image of a figure wrapped in a shroud, painted onto the wall, and surrounded by what appears to be scrap metal and broken droid parts, based on the few fingers and half a jaw he can see. The rest of the pile is just a group of what appear to be obviously useless batteries, heaped on one another, sliding up against the brick.

The words _WHERE ARE YOU?_ are written across the top of the image in messy letters, a sharp contrast from the Better Living billboard.

The image on the wall is difficult to see with the painted shroud wrapped around it, but it almost seems familiar. He squints at it suspiciously, but even when he gets closer, all he can make out is that its skin is grayish and its eyes look like electric stars.

Something is undeniably creepy about the general atmosphere of the shrine, small and sad and hopeful, a pile of dead machine fragments bathed in green neon. Gerard shivers and looks away, and tugs his hoodie tighter, wraps his arms around himself, and keeps walking along the street.

The first—person? he sees who makes eye contact is an orange-haired droid standing on a street corner, draped in a clear plastic rain poncho.

She looks up when she sees him hesitate at the junction of two crooked alleyways.

“Hey, cutie,” she croons, shifting her weight onto one leg, “you lookin’ for a fix?”

Gerard edges away, wary. Up close, he can see that she’s shivering underneath her poncho, and he wonders if she can feel the rain and the cold on her skin. “Um,” he says, “not—not today, um, sorry. Thanks anyway, though?”

“You lookin’ for someone? Lost a friend, family, lover? On the hidden track from the newspaper vamps?”

“No, just—just exploring. Um. I don’t know.”

She purses her lips and raises one eyebrow at him smoothly, appraising. “From the inner sectors, are ya?” At his mute nod, she continues, “I guessed it, you citykids all have that soft kinda look to them. Aw, I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s nice! Listen, kiddo, you might want to be careful around here—some of these people won’t go too easy on inner-Sector folk coming into their territory.”

“I just wanted—” Gerard bites at the edge of his fingernails helplessly. “My brother and I, we were just—”

Something in her face resolves itself, and her eyes clear. “Oh, shit,” she says, comprehension dawning in her expression, shaking her head and sending droplets of rainwater spinning off her bright hair, “you’re lookin’ to get out of the Stacks, yeah?”

He looks around, nervous at discussing such things out in the open, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone paying attention to the two of them. “Um, maybe.”

“Look, kiddo,” she says, and her voice softens, the accent slipping. “You’ll want to head right up this street here, then take two lefts, then you’ll find the Circuit, with the big shiny door. Ask for Baby, and they’ll get you to who you need to be talkin’ to. You’re not the first lost little kid to come runnin’ into the slums to avoid the scaries after doing something against Better Living’s code. Was it you or your brother?”

“I—um.” He swallows. “I mean, my brother and I, I’m. It’s both of us, we both need to go, we’re—we’re sticking together.”

She smiles, and it’s almost kind. “Course you are. Now get going.”

He goes obediently, keeping his head down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone else in the streets.

He doesn’t want to distrust the inhabitants of the Lobby, but their appearances don’t make them _easy_ for an inner-Sector citizen to trust.

There are other pornodroids with bright hair and translucent clothes, posed on corners; there are kids huddled in doorways and under awnings, wrapped in blankets and scraps of fabric, staring out into the street with huge eyes; there are people leaning against the walls of buildings, holding out hats or bags or other containers, begging for carbons or anything else that could help. He thinks he even sees a cat or some other small drenched animal, darting across the opening of a street up ahead, but it’s gone before he can get a better look through the rain.

His clothes are soaked from the rainwater by the time he gets to what must be the building the orange-haired droid had called the Circuit. There’s a shiny and dented sheet of metal pulled across the opening where a door should be, just as promised; he knocks hesitantly, feeling the reverb shuddering through his hand and down his arm where the metal shivers from the contact.

A loud voice comes from inside. “State your colors, stranger! Exxie, ex-exxie, or another wannabe-zonerat?”

Gerard wishes suddenly, furtively, that he had brought some sort of weapon, something to defend himself with.

He doesn’t know what most of those words mean.

“I’m not a draculoid or anything,” he manages to call out, then thinks, what? _what_? because what if he _is_?

He doesn’t know what these people consider to be _friends_ or _enemies_.

He thinks it’s probably different from what he would consider to be the same thing.

The sheet of metal is pulled away with a horrible scraping sound, and someone’s head pokes out. The newcomer has bright pink hair chopped off at the shoulders, like a pornodroid, but they’re undeniably human; their skin is mottled and dark, and they’re wearing a stained cloth wrapped around their head, covering one eye.

They smile down at Gerard, and he notices with a sickening flop of his stomach that both sides of their mouth have been stitched, scars running across their cheeks, like someone took a knife and sliced through their skin at the very corners of their smile.

“Didn’t think we’d get another newbie citykid lookin’ for a way out so soon, but goes to show that you never do know what’s gonna turn up on your doorstep,” they say, still smiling, lop-sided, and pull the makeshift door even wider. “I’m Baby—why don’t you come on in and tell me what you need.”

Gerard hesitates, but Baby just keeps holding the door open expectantly, so he steps cautiously inside.

The first thing he sees when his eyes adjust to the dull light is the words painted sloppily on the wall across from him— _FUCK BLI!_ with large red brushstrokes.

It looks like someone dipped a paintbrush in a bucket of blood.

He tries not to make it obvious that he’s staring, but it must be evident enough, because Baby just chuckles and shepherds him through a hallway into a back room, where there’s a wooden table and a couple of crooked chairs. The walls are covered in pictures that look like they’ve been cut out from magazines and newspapers and stuck together haphazardly—he can see photographs of explosions, weapons, animals, everything he could imagine.

Most of them are in color, which he knows to mean that the pictures came from inner-city magazines.

Baby sits down, throws one leg up on the tabletop, and exhales with finality. “All right, chip. Tell us what ya need.”

Gerard sits down nervously; the chair wobbles, and he grips the arms tightly. “I talked to a—a droid—she said you could get people out of the city?”

“Yeah, that’s what we do,” Baby says, leaning back. “Orange sends us people from time to time, keeps the business gears runnin’ smoothly. We operate out of the Circuit—that’s where you’re at now—or sometimes the Motherbox, you’ve probably heard of it, that’s where most of our insiders work. S’just you, or a group?”

“Me and my brother,” Gerard says, chewing on his fingernail again. He doesn’t have any clue what the Motherbox is, but he doesn’t want to admit it. “I’m—he’s still in school. I’m not, though. It’s just the two of us who need to leave.”

“What’d you get busted for?”

Gerard swallows. “Music,” he says. “It was music.”

Baby sits up, their leg sliding off the table. “Really? Haven’t seen a citykid get in trouble for music in over a year, damn. Little rebels, guess I always underestimate you inner-ringers. Well, out here in the slums, we see it our duty to get out those who want to go. Do y’know anything about how the tunnels work?”

Gerard shakes his head. “No, I—I work with data analyzing, and I’ve looked at some maps, but I don’t know anything else.”

It’s starting from level zero, so Baby gives him the quick rundown: Battery City might be a prison, but it’s well-furnished, and not everyone can survive in the desert. Those who stay within the city’s walls but don’t subscribe to its values call themselves _juvie halls_ , in homage to the eponymous Juvenile Rehabilitation Center that kids get sent to if they need some sort of medical attention. The Adolescent Correctional Facility is a subset of the JRC.

Juvie halls don’t take any sort of medication at all, which Baby says makes them the exact opposite of the Ritalin rats—those who get addicted to the pills, to the way the pills make them feel. Better Living’s washed-up basket cases.

It’s not a pleasant term.

Gerard feels something tight pressing against the inside of his chest at the way Baby curls their scarred lip in disgust when they say _addicted, always lookin’ for their next fix, can’t get enough of the hype, poor suckers_.

It feels like something slimy and revulsive is climbing up his throat, even just thinking about the pills.

Most juvie halls live in the Lobby, the unofficial slums of Battery City, and primarily rebel against Better Living by providing safe intermediary houses for the citizens who want to leave, as well as helping them get to the desert. Many of the juvie halls themselves are those who wanted to leave but couldn’t for some reason or other; some might be elderly, or sick, or disabled, or otherwise unfit to go gallivanting about in the sand, Baby explains. It isn’t paradise, inside or out.

The Lobby houses the living proof of Better Living’s failure to create a perfect society.

“You’re a regular Siddhartha,” Baby says, patting Gerard’s hand. “Nowhere to go but sideways from here, chip.”

It’s fascinating, and his curiosity is suddenly insatiable, so he asks as many questions as he dares about the tunnels.

Baby explains the most common methods of egress—either being smuggled out through one of the routine caravans in and out of the city, such as the garbage trucks that dump their waste in the desert or in the trunk of a car of someone with high enough clearance to take a personal trip outside of the city walls; or sneaking out via the tunnels, underground and hidden, all the way to the desert.

“There’s other ways, but those are the ones we cover,” Baby says. “You want something fancy, you better rally a troupe of fucking vamps to cover your ass, because you ain’t getting out without a serious firefight if you go in guns blazing.”

“The tunnels are fine,” says Gerard. “We don’t want any trouble.”

Baby laughs, and the stitches in their mouth shift. Gerard wants to ask how they got their scars, but he gets the sense that it’s something private, something not to be explained to near-strangers who randomly tumble in on your doorstep looking for any sort of help. “Chip, trouble’ll find you easy enough, if you really plan to leave the Battery behind. That’s part of the bargain—it’s a package deal. Trouble and liberty.”

“The tunnels will be fine,” Gerard repeats, and makes his voice as firm as he can. He thinks about Mikey, about keeping him safe, and he thinks about the mysterious potential of the tunnels, extending beneath the city itself, leading towards freedom for them both.

The tunnels lead out of the city and into the mystery of the desert, he knows that much, but he doesn’t have any idea what’s out there. It could be anything, he thinks, and feels a sudden thrill.

It could be anything.

It could be _everything_.

He gets promoted. He thinks it might have a little more to do with the way Korse looks at him and less about the actual quality of his work, but he goes quietly along with the change. The new job includes working with statistics on criminal activity, something he was told didn’t exist within the city walls, back when he and Mikey were kids.

He thinks, I should stop being surprised when something else turns out to be a lie.

He thinks about the graffiti and the collages he saw in the Lobby, and his fingers itch. It’s been so long since he drew something.

Korse supervises him this time. Gerard thinks that he probably wouldn’t feel so nervous about having Korse in the same room as he is if he were still taking his medications, but he isn’t going to let Mikey down.

“Better Living Industries has files on every citizen within Battery City, as well as those attempting to live outside it,” Korse says. His coattails make faint swishing sounds when he paces, fabric against fabric. “Created at birth, maintained until death. Everything is logged in the database of information. Access to the webways is strictly a matter of need-to-know, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Gerard says. He bites the edge of his fingernail. “Sir.”

“Your first assignment will be filing the recorded information our insectoid cameras have monitored out in the Zones. You will not be opening the files yourself, merely transferring them from the cameras’ backup systems to more permanent storage. All criminal activity happens on the grid; it’s all tracked and collected. You’ll be handling that information. Do not make mistakes.”

“No, sir.”

“Good.” Korse stops next to his chair, weight on one hand that’s pressed flat against the surface of the desk; Gerard makes an aborted movement to shift away, then freezes. “I expect you already know how to file data, but the servers within this subdivision are slightly different from the ones you’re used to. Pull up 463-Ej.exe for me.”

Gerard obediently taps on the correct program and types in his identification number when the computer flashes the authorization request. The program loads what looks like a map—he recognizes the pulsing red marker that indicates Battery City. “Sir?”

“The Zones,” says Korse. He leans forwards slightly. “Do you know how to check the radiation levels? No? Hover over the grid markings. Read the tag-box.”

The first tag-box that pops up states Z1 20-30 RAD./SI-COMP. Gerard dutifully reads it off, then looks up for approval.

Korse nods without looking at him. “Twenty-five is around the amount where our doctors can begin to note clinically observable changes to the internal organs, the blood, the bones. Read the next one for me.”

“Z2 50-100 rad./si-comp.,” Gerard says.

“The next.”

“Z3 100-150 rad./si-comp.”

“Next.”

“Z4 100-200 rad./si-comp.”

“Around the point at which radiation poisoning becomes evident. Continue.”

“Z5 150-500 rad./si-comp. That’s—” He hesitates. “That’s a lot.”

Korse nods again. “It is. After a few hours spent absorbing that level of radiation without the proper protection, the effects could be fatal. Read the next.”

Gerard looks back at the screen. “Z6 500-850 rad./si-comp.”

“Good.” Korse lifts his hand from the desk. “Past the end of the Zones, the radiation increases so as to be irreparably fatal. The individual would die in the time it took to rush them back to Battery City for emergency treatment. Our reanimation programs are limited when the physical body has been contaminated by radiation.”

Gerard hovers the cursor over the area past the final Zone. The tag-box pops up—N.A. 1000 RAD./SI-COMP.

“Better Living Industries has tried and continues to try its hardest to relocate the terrorists in the Zones to the city for radiation treatment,” Korse says. He sounds sincerely regretful; his lips are pressed tightly together. “Most refuse any form of aid, despite the circumstances. It’s a death sentence out there.”

“Yeah,” says Gerard. He looks back at the screen, at the tag-box emotionlessly declaring the levels of poison in the desert.

Korse moves away from the desk, clearing his throat. “I’ll leave you to your work. I trust you understand the importance of what we do here.”

“Yes,” Gerard says. He clicks off the interactive map.

“Good.” The faint sound of Korse’s coattails accompanies the hissing sound of the door sliding open and then subsequently shut.

Gerard exhales slowly. He doesn’t want to think about the fatal levels of radiation in the desert, or the terrorists who stubbornly refuse to be helped. He doesn’t know what could possibly be out there would be worth dying for. It has to be something special, to draw so many people away from Better Living.

He thinks, Korse knows. He _must_ know; there isn’t a reason he would have shown him the data otherwise.

Mikey, he thinks. Mikey would be what’s worth dying for.

The first few Zones are habitable if they have some form of protective suits or something similar; it’s likely that they could find something along those lines, since they would hardly be the first to need them.

He goes back to sorting the personal files. P-files, they’re called—the personal laundry lists of wrongdoing. Every citizen has some kind of dirt on them that Better Living Industries could use as a worthy motive if one were for some reason needed.

Nobody’s perfect, he thinks. It feels ironic and bitter.

He checks out his own personal records, making sure to clear his tracks as thoroughly as possible. His file is brief but damning.

> _LOW RISK POTENTIAL. Minor addiction to sleeping/calming medication [prescribed methylphenidate compound 90pg/day]. Possession of contraband—illegal substances [mescaline, assort. others]. Minor deviation of brief interest in illegal art/artistry [prescribed 150pg m-mods for standard correction; recovered extremely well after several continued therapeutic sessions with Dr. XXXXX]._

His heart skips several beats when he first reads the notes, thinking of what could happen if anyone decides to penalize him for it. But there’s nothing worse than that in the file. He thinks, so then they don’t know about the trips into the Lobby. It’s a terribly relieving thought, that there might be something sacred left hidden.

Then he finds the file on Mikey.

The title lists him as MEDIUM RISK POTENTIAL. Gerard clicks frantically on the rest of the file, but all that appears is a warning box notifying him that the following information is not available at his level of clearance.

“Fuck,” he hisses under his breath, furious and beyond caring that profanity is breaking the rules again. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

On impulse he searches for Ray.

The file that pops up doesn’t list Ray as any sort of risk—stamped across the top is the title line INDISPOSED [CHARGES LISTED HEREIN—SEE PREVIOUS DOC].

It’s enough to frighten him into not looking at anything else for a while, and frantically erasing all digital traces of what he’s been doing.

He doesn’t know if he should tell Mikey.

No, he thinks. That’s a lie. He knows he should tell Mikey, but he doesn’t know exactly _what_ to tell him, much less how to phrase the information that he’s pieced together from scraps of observation and stealth.

_Hey, I think our friend is dead—_

_Hey, I think our friend was killed—_

_Hey, I’m sorry, but . . ._

There isn’t a good way to tell Mikey anything, these days. The list of secrets he’s keeping is growing longer and longer.

The second time Gerard ventures into the Lobby, he brings a rain jacket.

He keeps his head down as he skulks through the cobbled streets and alleyways, not looking for anything in particular, just—looking. He sees more pornodroids, and this time he gets close enough to see the exhaustion and disgust lurking behind their eyes. He sees more scavenger kids huddled in doorways and hollow spaces, teeth sharp and eyes glittering from the shadows. He sees endless graffiti splattered all across the concrete walls— _BETTER DYING, B-LIES, DON’T SWALLOW THEIR LIES OR THEIR PILLS, IF THIS IS PURGATORY THEN I WANT HELL, WHERE ARE YOU DESTROYA?_ He doesn’t see the droid with the bright orange hair, but he doesn’t even really think to look for her, overwhelmed by everything else there is to see. He doesn’t go back to the Circuit either, where he knows Baby and the other juvie halls linger; he moves in a widening circle, sneaking further and further from the inner city as he gets bolder and bolder. The Lobby isn’t the most colorful place in the world, but to his eyes—unused to the street art and flickering neon and waving window flags and scrap-patch clothing—it’s absolutely dazzling. When he finally heads back towards the nearest transit Hub so he can catch the train back home, he almost doesn’t want to leave.

The third time he purposefully takes the wrong bus and steps off more confidently into the wrong ring of the city, he doesn’t think about what he’s doing. He thinks, _yes_ , and then he’s swept up into the color and bustle of the Lobby, a different universe from the one he’s used to, and it’s easy to forget about the rules he’s breaking and the possibility of retribution and the smile lifting the corners of Korse’s mouth when he presents the data he’s been working on, the smile that clings to him in his dreams that night until he wakes up shaking and turned on and suddenly frightened.

He opens Mikey’s file on impulse, the second time he clicks on it; he isn’t expecting anything to be different from the first time he looked.

But something catches his eye.

He doesn’t know what it is, at first.

The status of the file has in fact changed, moving from RESTRICTED—CLEARANCE LEVEL 9 REQUIRED FOR ACCESS to LIMITED—CLEARANCE LEVEL 6 REQUIRED FOR ACCESS.

Heart in his throat, he clicks on the link to open the rest of the file.

The title says HIGH RISK POTENTIAL.

He almost doesn’t want to read it, but he has to.

Gerard wasn’t aware of everything that’s listed in the file, but his heart sinks lower and lower with each new word he reads. Reports of trouble in school where Mikey asks the wrong sorts of questions, trouble amongst peers where Mikey doesn’t socialize the proper way for boys his age, and—horror of horrors—a brief paragraph at the very bottom of the file that proclaims, _Major L6-4 deviation into research of illegal music [introduced by XXXXXXX XXXX], promoted by friends [see previous] and supported by the usage of data blockers on personal computer and headphones_ —and he stops reading there, heart beating wildly in his chest.

Realizing he’s frightened is almost an afterthought.

He’s terrified of what could be done to Mikey.

He knows there isn’t a way back from this, not if Better Living knows about their deepest and darkest secrets. Better Living could separate them, drug them up, brainwash them—

They have to leave.

They have to leave the city, he thinks, and tries to process what he’s feeling. When he figures out how he’s reacting, it’s just a constant wash of inevitability.

Finally. At last. Once and for all.

It had to happen anyway, he thinks. There wouldn’t be any way to go back after the music and the drugs.

The rest of the day is a blur of anxiety and fear and mind-numbing stress, bubbling through the monotony. Gerard runs the numbers like usual, files the data like usual, and tries not to do anything that will make anyone— _Korse_ —suspicious. Even breathing the wrong way could get him caught. He triple-checks his computer to make sure he’s deleted all his history, makes sure that no one should be able to know.

When he gets off work, the bus ride home takes an aeon.

He runs from the Hub all the way to the door, and lets it slam behind him with a loud _bang!_ even though he’s supposed to make sure to let it close carefully.

He yells frantically for Mikey as soon as he’s inside the house, actually yells, he’s so scared. All he can think about is how he knows he can’t lose Mikey or he’ll die, truly die, just give up completely.

Mikey is completely freaked out at first by the uncharacteristic yelling, but he calms down somewhat when he figures out that nothing immediately dangerous has happened. Gerard hugs him then, grabs onto him and holds him to his chest to reassure himself that he’s still alive, that they’re both still alive, and Mikey just kind of buries his head in Gerard’s shirt, even though he’s already a couple of inches taller than his brother.

He’s so scared, so incredibly frightened.

He doesn’t know what they’re going to do, but he knows it has to be something.

To Mikey, this scenario was an inevitability from the moment Gerard had started taking the higher dosages of pills. But Gerard is still terrified and anxious and shaking, so Mikey just hugs him back as tightly as he can, and then they sit down together on the couch and start to talk about formulating a plan.

_You know I won’t be able to follow you_ , the droid says.

They’re standing on the hill overlooking Battery City again. He didn’t notice before that the hill was made of sand.

He thinks, I don’t want anyone to follow me, that’s why we’re leaving in the first place.

The droid sighs, then coughs. _Fucking rust_ , it grumbles. _Been a while since I had a new battery pack. I guess it’s true what they say, you have to die to change the world_.

It’s a stupid saying, he thinks, and looks at the rooftops of the city. From this far away, it doesn’t look like the same place it is when he walks through the streets, or when he and Mikey take the bus to school, or when he presses his nose up against the windowpane to look out at the stars.

 _Yes,_ the droid agrees, _I do believe it is_.

The hill they’re standing on is made of batteries, he realizes, and a moment later the pile collapses and he’s sucked down into the darkness.

***

Then there was, of course, Mikey’s story. Discovering things for himself. Falling back into his own body. Working it all out.

The entrance to the tunnels leading out of the city was located along the 1138th Street Underpass. Mikey hasn’t been waiting for his brother to take things into his own hands; he’s been doing exploring of his own, privately, always making sure to hide what he’s been doing from his family and his peers at school. He doesn’t want Gerard to get swept up into this mess, or to wind up in any more trouble—or to be put back on the higher doses of medication. He’s been thinking about leaving kind of vaguely since Ray first showed him the music when he was fifteen, but the concept never really gained corporeality until he found Gerard on the bathroom floor.

Then he decided it was the best and only option that he had left.

He sneaks out at night the first time, long after curfew has hushed the city, when he’s sure that Gerard and their father are both sleeping.

He carefully adjusts his headphones to say that he’s been listening to them quietly in his bed for the required eight hours. It’s a trick Ray taught him, before—

His heart is pounding in his chest when he opens the front and he thinks wildly that it’s loud enough that he might get caught just from that sound alone, someone must hear the noise and come to investigate. But no one comes, and he isn’t discovered, and he sneaks unhindered into the Lobby under the cover of the relative dark of the city’s artificial night and shadows.

The main thing he’s discovered from his nighttime trips into the slums, besides the fact that the inhabitants of the Lobby don’t like talking to inner-ring kids, is the Stairs.

They probably have a better and more formal name, but he’s been thinking of them as _the Stairs_ since he first found them, mostly because they look almost exactly like an antique staircase that’s been upgraded for the modern, digital world.

He knows that the Stairs lead out of Battery City and into—

Whatever lies beyond the walls. The desert, probably.

He knows that you have to have a Level 12 or higher passcard to exit—or to enter—through the Stairs, because he’s seen Exterminators using them.

“ _Exterminators_ ,” Gerard repeats in a hushed voice, when Mikey mentions this. Mikey wonders if Gerard is thinking about Korse. Gerard doesn’t mention Korse of his own volition very often, but if Mikey brings him up, Gerard flushes pink and looks shifty until the topic is changed.

The Stairs are also so heavily protected that the only way to exit via them, even with a passcard, would require an actual army to break through the swarming battalions of watchful draculoids.

Mikey had heard once from a green-haired droid who was missing both her legs deep in the Lobby that there were some scarce rumors—legends, more like—of a few desperate civilians trying to escape that way, but no one in living memory has ever survived to tell the tale.

“Well, good news, then,” says Gerard, “because there’s another way.” And he tells Mikey about the tunnels, and about Baby and the other civilians who call themselves _juvie halls_ , who live and work within Battery City but don’t subscribe to its rules. “They help people get out of the city,” he explains, “if they need to.”

“D’you think they could help _us_?” asks Mikey, skeptical. He’s wary to trust a group of people with already dubious morals that he’s never even met.

None of the juvie halls _he_ met wanted to talk to him very much.

But Gerard just nods eagerly. “Yeah, there’s a whole underground system for this sort of stuff, it’s really great actually—they smuggle people out in supply trucks, construction equipment, military vehicles, all those kinds of things. And there are still the tunnels, obviously, which I think makes the most sense for us because the other options are mostly for kids who lost their parents.”

“ _We_ lost our parents,” Mikey points out mulishly, before he can think better of it. There’s a moment where he doesn’t know why he says that—he doesn’t think they ever had a mother in the first place even though logically they must have had one at some point, and anyway they still have their father, which is all that matters in the end, right?—but then he shakes it off.

“I meant really little kids,” says Gerard, and pokes Mikey’s cheek affectionately, “idiot. But if you wanna spend a day trapped in the trunk of a car that smells like garbage and stuff, then be my guest, I guess.”

“Ew,” Mikey complains. He wrinkles his nose at the thought. “Fine, forget it, we can do it your way.”

The other biggest revelation that comes from Mikey’s gathered information about the Stairs is that they can reasonably deduce that Better Living has been lying about the outside world being completely uninhabitable—since people from within the city _must_ go in and out relatively regularly, even if they are official personnel.

So maybe the desert isn’t as poisoned as everyone says, or isn’t even poisoned at all. Maybe everything isn’t a wasteland.

Maybe there isn’t a desert at all.

Maybe—

It’s like a dam breaking, like the floodgates have finally been opened. They excitedly fling ideas back and forth at each other—what if everything they thought they knew was wrong? is the desert really inhabitable? is the radiation no more than a myth? is Australia actually still existent? what do the pills _really_ do, besides allowing you to sink more easily into a sedated stupor?

They’re both still kind of scared of the potential of the alleged _terrorists_ , though. It takes a lot to unlearn lifelong indoctrination, no matter what new and shocking secrets they’ve uncovered about Better Living’s dirty laundry.

Gerard isn’t thinking that they’ll escape the city and be heroes. He just wants to protect Mikey.

He’s a little overprotective, actually, since he kind of missed a couple years of _brotherishness_ and whatnot, what with being drugged up and all. Mikey is a rebellious teenager and annoyed with all the coddling, but he also likes having the real Gerard back, so he doesn’t complain about it.

Much.

When Mikey thinks about leaving the city, he thinks of it as the only way for them to stay together.

Besides, it’ll be an adventure, and Mikey has always wanted to go on an adventure with his brother. This one will be taking place under slightly different circumstances than he had imagined, but—

That doesn’t really matter, because it’s happening all the same.

Back to back and hand in hand. The two of them against the world.

When it really comes down to it, they don’t want to be superheroes, or to lead a revolution, or to stop Better Living Industries—they just want to be together, and safe, and if that means leaving then they’ll leave.

Together.

Side by side.

They’re still teenagers—Gerard is almost nineteen, and Mikey is sixteen.

It’s been nearly a full year since Ray disappeared.

Gerard still feels guilty about only noticing Ray’s disappearance when he realized he should have noticed. Mikey has told him several times not to mention it, not to bring up the subject, but Gerard still wants to do _some_ thing as penance. He thinks, if they can make it out of the city and be safe, he can keep Mikey safe from harm, and then he’ll begin to pay off everything he owes for fucking up so badly.

***

Then the unthinkable happens: their father gets in trouble. One of their neighbors—the lady Mikey’s talked to a couple of times, the one who’s recently married—found the bag of medication that Mikey left in the alley and _did the right thing_ by reporting it to the authorities.

The one consolation and upside to the situation is that Better Living officials couldn’t trace the pills to one person, since Mikey had the forethought to scrape off the labels that said Gerard’s name and ID number and whatnot. But what they can do is check the medication levels reported in each household and determine from where the only missing pills could have come.

Better Living Industries goes after their father, since Mikey is still underage and Gerard isn’t really a serious suspect because he works for Better Living Industries and is being monitored more closely. Possibly Korse has had a hand in the proceedings; there really isn’t a way for either of them to know.

Time is running out.

The two of them wake up the next day and their father is gone.

Well, he’s in the kitchen making breakfast as usual, but Gerard and Mikey are old enough now that they can tell themselves that it’s not the same, no matter how convincing the mimicry might be. It’s heartbreaking, because on the surface the robot acts exactly like their father—even likes the same sorts of things, looks the same, talks the same, everything is identical on the surface. But the differences are there, just a layer underneath.

The replication is only perfect if you don’t look too closely.

As soon as the two of them get a moment alone, in secret, Mikey says quietly, “How do we know that the—the one before this wasn’t a droid, too?” and Gerard doesn’t have an answer for that.

This is the final catalyst, Gerard thinks, with a grim sense of inevitability.

They’re both probably on a suspect list by now, Mikey is specifically being tracked through Better Living’s personal files, Gerard isn’t taking any medications at all, and their father is an android.

They don’t have anything left to stay for.

“How about a week from now,” says Gerard. “That way we can have time to get everything together—clothes and food and stuff—and wait for things to die down or whatever, since they’ll probably be watching more closely right after they sent in the—the droid.” He doesn’t want to say _replacement_.

Now that they have a definitive date to leave, everything feels strange and distorted, like he’s seeing it all for the first time, through new eyes. It almost becomes an itemized list, a catalogue of possessions, of things from when he was younger.

The shared nightstand where their alarm clocks blink and glow.

The kitchen counter where he bruised his hip when he was eight badly enough that he could barely walk.

The dining room table where they used to eat dinner together when he and Mikey were much younger.

The sofa in the living room where he remembers sitting with Mikey and watching Mousekat episodes before bed.

The headphone jack, where both of their headsets rest, charging before the evening falls.

Their room, with the beds and the closet they share and the heavy curtains.

The window ledge where he used to like to curl up and watch the lights of the city when he was supposed to be asleep.

The drawing he did of Mikey fighting monsters when Mikey was just a kid.

He thinks he’s probably going to miss living in the house with all its memories and familiar corners and edges.

The next week is a blur of surreptitious packing—they don’t really have many personal belongings, but they prepare a few changes of clothes and some non-perishable food and Mikey’s flash drive of music. Mikey takes apart his headphones and finally removes the tracking chip on the day before they leave. The music belongs to me for good now, he thinks, and feels a sort of vicious triumph.

Gerard still has five days of having to go to work as though everything were normal. At first he doesn’t think he can do it, then he remembers that he’s doing it for Mikey, and it’s less terrible.

It’s still terrible, though. There isn’t any avoiding that.

They’re the longest five days of his life; every second lasts a century, and the first day can’t end quickly enough.

He has panic attacks, often; at least once per day and usually more frequently than that. He isn’t taking any sedatives anymore so he can’t just swallow a pill or several and make it all go away. Each time he breaks down at work, he ends up in the bathroom at BL-HQ, curled up on the floor, shivering like crazy and trying to calm his racing heartbeat.

He feels like he’s going to explode if he has to fake apathy and a smile for one more second.

He can picture the blood and guts splattered all over the walls.

He wonders who would have to clean up the mess afterwards.

There’s a timer counting down in his head: five days, and he’s gripping his thighs so hard his fingernails dig into the skin and leave red marks even through the fabric of his work pants; four days, and he’s holding onto the edge of the sink in the bathroom at work and trying not to vomit; three days—

And Korse walks into the bathroom while he’s slumped against the back wall.

Gerard is breathing through his nose with his jaw clamped shut, because he’s worried that if he opens his mouth he’ll scream or throw up or just burst into flames. He’s trying not to shake out of his skin, but his hands won’t stop trembling.

He hears the footsteps first, then he sees Korse, and he freezes.

He doesn’t know if Korse will arrest him or something even worse; he’s seen the static-white raygun that Korse always carries in his belt.

He thinks, fuck, oh fuck, I never got to say goodbye to Mikey.

Korse walks over to him, kneels down, and touches his forehead. Gerard wants to close his eyes in anticipation of being hit or drugged, but he can’t move. He wonders if draculoids have already dragged Mikey from his classroom and arrested him, or if Mikey is still in school, oblivious, unaware that their plans are collapsing.

He can’t breathe; he feels light-headed.

But instead of striking him across the face or sticking a syringe in his neck, Korse just helps him to stand up and drink some water from the bathroom sink. The water is cool and soothing against his dry throat.

He can’t _breathe_ —

Korse lifts his hands and brushes the wrinkles out of Gerard’s white uniform shirt, then smooths the collar. He turns him towards the mirror to see himself; it looks less like he’s falling apart so visibly that everyone can tell.

He still can’t figure out how to close his eyes.

Korse walks him back to his desk, then leaves him there, sitting numbly in his chair.

All without saying a word.

The incident is over within two minutes, but it lingers in his memory for the rest of the day, no matter what he does. It’s creepy and confusing and the eighteen-year-old-boy part of his brain is _so_ into that, no matter how much he hates to admit it to himself. He’s revolted by the thought of Korse touching him, but it’s still hot to fantasize about being controlled and used and told what to do.

He’s always disgusted with himself afterwards.

He knows on some level that it’s wrong; Korse is older and mysterious and powerful, and he _knows_ things. Gerard knows with absolute certainty that Korse could incriminate both him and Mikey if he so chose, but he hasn’t yet, and it’s sickeningly thrilling and anxiety-inducing and disgustingly sexy. Gerard wants to _be_ him, to have that same presence of mind and command of control.

And also probably let Korse fuck him.

Everything is just confusing.

The fantasies where Korse has him on his knees telling him precisely what to do and how to do it are hot in the moment, but when he dwells on them afterwards, he wants to scrub himself clean, just to try to erase even the thoughts themselves. Sometimes he gets so worked up that the only thing that stops him from jerking off in the bathroom is the unnerving feeling that there are probably cameras hidden in every room of the building, watching.

He doesn’t want to keep thinking about it, but he doesn’t have control over his dreams. He doesn’t like dreading going to sleep. He doesn’t let Mikey crawl into his bed in the middle of the night anymore, because he’s scared he’ll hurt him somehow, if he wakes up and thinks he’s still in the dream and doesn’t recognize his brother.

He doesn’t know how to explain it to Mikey. He doesn’t want to have to try.

Battery City operates off a philosophy that it’s no shame to append or alter any emotion by taking medications—they’re just supplements, nothing out of the ordinary. Sex is seen as just another way to feel good, if not for procreation; it’s a natural human process. While marriage is primarily heterosexual (since its main function is to promote the expectation of children), there aren’t any rules or even strict guidelines concerning the sanctity of marriage or whatever.

Better Living Industries doesn’t discriminate on basis of sex, gender, sexuality, race, ability, or anything else—that was Airi Takahashi’s original creed.

Everyone should have a chance to live _better_.

There are certain medications you can take to increase sexual pleasure, but there’s an application process and the pills are generally only issued to married couples anyway.

There are also the pornodroids, which are seen as just another way to control the emotions and to stay healthy, since sex is natural; there is, however, a slight stigma associated with the choice of pornodroids over the other medications, since their most common customers are all from the Lobby. _Lobby_ _rats_ , his coworkers say, sniggering behind their hands. The droids are for those who can’t get the pills.

The general consensus is that sex is natural, just a part of life, but unless it’s for procreation, it’s kind of pointless when there are other ways to get the same feeling. So you can take the pills or go to a pornodroid if you want to relieve frustration in order to stay healthy, but most of the time it’s an emotionless affair.

Besides, a common side effect of the sedative medications issued to every Battery City citizen is a decreased libido.

Without the suppression of the pills, Gerard is even more confused; he’s eighteen, his hormones are all over the place. He and his “girlfriend”—the girl who disappeared—didn’t do much more than make out a couple of times and hold hands and kind of just exist together for a while. Sometimes when he thinks of her he can’t picture what her face looked like. Sometimes he thinks he imagined her. He remembers at least what her hands looked like, fingers wrapped around his, and that’s a small comfort.

Mikey notices how shaken he is the night after Korse finds him in the bathroom, but Gerard doesn’t say anything to him beyond reassuring Mikey that they haven’t been found out.

It shouldn’t be a lie, but it feels like one anyway.

He hasn’t developed his fantasies to cover what would or could happen if Korse confronts him about the plans to leave, but sometimes he fantasizes about him and Korse fighting faceless terrorists together and he has to remind himself that he and Mikey are planning to go willingly into terrorist-occupied territory.

He wonders if he should bring a weapon. He doesn’t know where he would even get anything sophisticated enough, like a raygun, though. Korse would probably know, he thinks.

He is so sick of thinking about Korse.

The constant adrenaline high isn’t helping the turmoil. Korse treats him like a subordinate employee, constantly, even though his composure occasionally slips and he betrays a weird-as-hell sense of humor and creativity, and that’s the only time that Gerard thinks, oh no.

He doesn’t know what love would feel like. He doesn’t think he would have a good frame of reference.

It doesn’t feel good, whatever it is. It makes him feel like he’s going to throw up.

He knows he loves Mikey, but that’s different, that’s about family and protecting each other and always having the other one’s back. Korse is all about fantasy and obviously the undercurrent of sex and control, the sort of thing that always makes him feel like shit in the morning.

He doesn’t think it’s anything close to the same level—he would always choose to stay with Mikey over anyone else, no matter what.

Nothing actually _happens_ , he just thinks about it. A lot. It’s kind of embarrassing, so he doesn’t do anything about it or even mention it to Mikey at all, and then before he can get up the nerve to do either of those things, the time comes for them to leave the city.

***

And they do.

It’s simple as that.

He was actually expecting it to be more difficult—he had braced himself for having to fight their way through the tunnels, battling flocks of vicious draculoids to reach the outside world, but they don’t encounter a single living person in the tunnels.

They couldn’t find any sort of really useful weapon, not a raygun or anything of that caliber, but before they left the house, Gerard went to the kitchen drawer and took out two cooking knives that he doesn’t think anyone would miss.

He doesn’t know if he could actually stab someone, if it came to that; he thinks that he probably could if someone were trying to hurt Mikey.

He hopes it won’t actually come to that, but of course there’s no way of knowing until it happens.

When he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know what kind of blockade he thought they would run into, but even without knowing what the obstacle would be, it’s easier than any preconceived ideas. (His secret private fantasies are all about Korse arriving at the last possible minute, usually impeccable uniform in tatters and eyes wild, to beg him to stay, but he doesn’t know how to even begin to articulate _that_.)

It’s long past curfew when they sneak out of the house in the middle of the night. The streets are lit up by the eerie constant lights of the city.

The streets of the inner Sector are deserted, but there are a few shadowy people skulking around the alleyways when the two of them make it into the Lobby.

They avoid every sign of movement they can, tense and bracing for a confrontation.

Mikey is shivering with the perpetual cold of the late-night Lobby streets when they finally make it to the entrance of the tunnels. They’re both wearing t-shirts and light jackets in the darkest colors they could find.

The entrance to the first tunnel is covered by a door that’s little more than a sheet of corrugated metal, dangling crookedly, half off its hinges. It creaks loudly when he tries to push it open, and Mikey jumps and wraps his arms around himself, still shivering.

Gerard fumbles in his backpack until he finds the small canister of oil he’d packed in case of this specific situation, remembering the Circuit in the Lobby. He covers the hinges in the stuff until it swings open without a sound.

He thinks, this is it. No going back.

His hands are covered in grease, and he does his best to wipe them off on his jacket.

They sneak through the tunnel, sticking close together, heads down and hoods up, but thankfully don’t encounter any visible cameras.

Next they reach another gate, this one with rusting metal bars, which they’ve been expecting based on the information Gerard’s juvie hall connections had given them.

Gerard hits the lock with a loose piece of metal plating until it gives.

They sneak to the next gate.

This one requires a BL-ID card to scan before it allows passage.

“Hold on, I think I could try—maybe we can—” Gerard gets out the knife he’d grabbed from the kitchen and tries to pry the lock open. The metal strains as he wedges it into the gate, then snaps; he drops he broken pieces of the knife and jumps back with a hiss of pain, watching as blood wells up along the shallow scrape on his hand.

Mikey’s eyes are huge in the pale light of the underground tunnel. “Shit,” he says softly. “I don’t think we can go back.”

“No, wait—” Gerard drops his bag in his haste to get something out of his jeans pocket, ignoring the sharp sting of pain when his injured hand brushes against the rough fabric. He holds the passcard aloft triumphantly. “Better Living Industries employee, at your service.”

“They’ll know it was us then,” Mikey says, and kicks at the side of the tunnel; his shoe bounces off the concrete wall. “If we use that, we’re screwed.”

“Nah,” says Gerard. “It just means we can’t come back.” He tries to be flippant about it, he really does, but he still feels like something heavy is growing inside his chest, pressing on his ribs.

Using the passcard means leaving behind everything about their old lives, permanently, no going back. He can picture the added entry to his file in the data archives— _convicted terrorist sympathizer, known to have committed treason by using Better Living materials to engineer passage into forbidden areas_. Everything is going to be so incredibly fucked.

He looks at Mikey and thinks, I can do this. _We_ can do this, because we have to.

He swipes the card before he can change his mind.

The lock glows briefly green, and something inside the mechanism clicks; there’s a creaking noise, and the gate swings slowly open. Mikey exhales shakily. “Shit,” he says, and runs his tongue along his teeth.

“Okay, let’s go then,” says Gerard, and marches forwards to disguise how unnerved he is by the whole process. His hand still hurts, but he pretends it doesn’t anymore because he doesn’t want Mikey to think he’s weak.

They walk for what seems like hours after that. Neither of them wants to keep trudging along without saying anything, but there isn’t really anything to say, so they walk in silence. After a while, Gerard reaches out and grabs onto Mikey’s hand, and they keep going together, step by step.

After an aeon of walking to the sound of the steady _drip-drip-drip_ of sewage water running along the walls and the bottom of the tunnel, getting the soles of their shoes wet, they reach a gate that looks like it’s glowing.

It hurts their eyes to look at for more than a fraction of a second.

When their eyes adjust somewhat, they realize the gate itself isn’t glowing, it’s just the sunlight coming in through the grating. They had left in the middle of the night, but the brightness of the light suggests that it’s daylight outside the city. The city is always kind of hazy and overcast, even during the day when the Fact News reporter promises _another bright sunny day in Battery City!_ and that’s considered “bright” enough.

Gerard doesn’t think they’ve been walking for long enough to warrant such a drastic shift in time.

This is unlike anything either of them could dream up.

He kicks at the gate a couple of times until it kind of just falls open with a horrible sound of metal scraping and dragging against concrete, and that’s when they both notice that it’s really hot and they’re way overdressed.

It turns out to be mostly a good thing that they’re dressed for city weather, though.

They realize almost as soon as they start walking that they’re glad to be covered.

There isn’t much time to be relieved.

They learn quickly after that discovery that Mikey burns in the sun—his nose goes all red almost immediately, and Gerard freaks out and pours water on him, which makes Mikey splutter indignantly and say it’s a waste of water, and they get dangerously close to yelling and tears just like that.

The grate from which they’ve come has a little grimy sewer water trickling out of it, and the walls of the city are tall and white and smooth. There’s nothing but endless sand and sloping hills for as far as either of them can see; their eyes are still adjusting to the light.

The sun is _really_ bright.

Gerard thinks, well.

He thinks, okay.

“We might as well just start walking, and see where we end up, right,” he says, trying to sound like he has some idea what he’s doing instead of being totally lost. He doesn’t want Mikey to worry.

“It’s not like we can turn back now,” Mikey points out.

There’s a better chance of running into someone or something nice or a place they can stay for a while if they walk _away_ from the staggering white walls of the city. Neither of them has any idea of the scope of the desert or how long they would have to travel before they reach a place where they could actually die from radiation or acid rain or whatever other horrors lie lurking in the sand and dust, but it’s probably a long way away.

They can worry about that sort of thing later.

There isn’t anything else for them to do.

They start walking.


End file.
